When I was nine, my oldest brother left one day in the fall, at dawn. His traveling companion, also our relative, left with him, kissing me lightly on my cheek. I was awake. I could have opened my eyes, but I had said my goodbyes the night before. I wasn’t going to do it again. I heard them whisper. I heard them close the door. I heard their footsteps. I heard my mother’s muffled voice. I didn’t fall back asleep. I lied there, not knowing how to close my eyes.
When I was nine, Daddy was also not home. He had left the year before. I cried often. I hadn’t exactly learned to be tough and hold my tears like my mother. So I cried every chance I got. There was this one day, among many others, when my other brother came home from work and saw me running with tears to my mother’s bedroom. And I heard my mother say to him, “she misses her father.” I liked to think I was the most fragile because I was the baby of the family. I didn’t know that my sister and brothers had been through worst.
When I was nine, I hated school. I cried every morning. I prayed for it to end, for my pain to go away. I don’t know if I knew what that pain was. My father wasn’t there. But I wasn’t mad at him. I guess I just wanted to cry, and their absence was the perfect excuse. So I spent that year hating school. It was also the year I decided I loved my father more because he wasn’t there.
Those years ended somehow. I reunited with my father, not with my older brother. I also left my younger brother, so did my mother, later my sister did too. Today, my siblings are in serious relationships, married, and engaged, soon-to-be-married. They’ve all experienced leaving. They’ve all been left. Some, more than others. I didn’t exactly grow up with them. I sort of became my own version, more American and more confused. I experienced leaving them. I experienced living with them, at different times, in different places, temporarily. I learned to enjoy moments with them because I knew one of us would leave again. None of us likes to stay put. We are, after all, our mother’s children. We outgrow our normal states of being. We outgrown ourselves. We like to break free, maybe because we feel our mother never did. So we do what we think she would have done. Higher education, traveling constantly, learning to adapt and transform and recreate. We like to do it all. We like to make her happy, and somehow, somewhere, find our own happiness. We are not prisoners, so we take every opportunity to move, forward, always running away from something within ourselves.
Since we’ve all moved on to different homes, we try, every now and then to reconnect and reunite. We had a family reunion one summer. Temporary, but a reunion nevertheless. We learned that we like to drink, that we still laugh, that we have funny little habits. We also learned that we all have significant others and that we put them on pedestals.
I am not sure I will ever have that childhood idea of all of us. I used to want that from God, pretending there was one, all the time. I really prayed hard. I am not even sure I want that anymore, because it would be temporary. We would get bored. We would move again.
Maybe this is our destiny. The travelers, the immigrants, partly due to our mother’s past, partly because of our own desires. But no matter where we end up, we always remember how they left us, the way they parted, and the way we left them, the way we parted from them. Always.

I am in constant turmoil, with this city. This city is driving me insane. I want it. I don’t want it. I need it. I don’t need it. I hate it. I love it. I don’t see happy people here, no one has that glow, that satisfactory smile. I feel like everyone is tired, like me, always. There is such distance between us all, no connection, no sober conversations, no meaningful glances. Have I become just as sad and cynical? Have I lost my appetite for new things, new people? Lately, I don’t even introduce myself to new people. I don’t carry conversations. I get bored. I zone everyone out. I half-listen. I don’t listen. I don’t talk about myself. I don’t give out my real name, my nationality, my very complicated past life. I leave out names and relations. I am just distant. I am tired of connecting and proximity. I just want to close my eyes. Maybe I want to go back to that fantasy New York, the one that is unlike the version I live now. The one that was sort of perfect in my hand, unreachable with a certain glow, the one I was passionate about. I used to envy everyone who was part of the city. I used to be really sad when I left the city, driving home, thinking I had nothing to go back to. Now, I have what I wanted. And I almost don’t want it. I am tired of transforming myself all the time. I am sick of my self-criticism, my self-deprecation. I am really just sick of it. I want all that negative thoughts of myself to be, I don’t know, sucked out of me or something.
I am tired of transforming so I just do the everyday thing and I don’t try to make it happen, I just let it be, you know whatever is meant to be. If I happen to run into someone, I say hello. If a group of musicians come to the train, I hit pause on my iPod, and then when they leave, I am back in my own head. And some days nothing happens, and it’s okay. I just go to bed, not even hoping tomorrow would be any different.

Today is sunny. We drink coffee and laugh, and the laughter stays in my memory. I have a lot of memories. I have a good memory; I remember faces and details well. I play them in my head. Sounds, laughter, everything. I remember what people wear and if they have worn them before. It makes me happy, the act of remembering.
But remembering comes with nostalgia since you are so absorbed by the memories. They haunt you in a way, if you remember too much. I am so nostalgic, almost always. I remember, for example, the perfume my cousin Sasha’s mother used to wear, and if I smell it now, it’ll remind me of the two of them, how me and Sasha were best friends and how we always seemed to be together.
It’s worse, remembering how once your house was full of faces, people, and they no longer have a presence. And even worse when you see them again, and they no longer fit that memory. They’ve changed. You’ve changed. And it’s just not the same. It’s worse when these are people who are part of you, by blood. You know, like brothers, fathers, grandmothers. It’s worse when you remember how they hug you so lovingly, so deliberately, so well that it hurts, it really hurts the memory of their touch.
But it’s not so bad. You’ll die with so many good memories, so many details in your head. The smells, the way they wanted their coffee, the way they talked and asked you how you were, how your silence worried them, made them ask, “something is wrong, tell me, what is it?”
So we finished our coffees and I looked out, to the New York that was once just another place I wanted to conquer. I felt nostalgic, because our coffees finished, because we got up and got in the car and then they drove away, because it wasn’t yesterday anymore, because I was alone again with everything I ever wanted.