Darya means sea in Farsi.
I love water. I’ve loved it ever since I was little and played in the beach with my cousins. We used to love the waves. We’d stand near the edge, afraid of getting any closer, and sang for the waves to come faster. The thrill of all that energy and strength killed us, made us laugh so hard we’d hold our stomachs and yell. The ocean was like one of those toys we wanted so bad but couldn’t have, or like a big blanket that encompassed all of our dreams. We were little. The ocean was ours and yet it was so far beyond our reach. We’d bury our feet underneath the silky sands, pick crystal seashells and add more stones to our collection. We role-played by the ocean. I was always the mean, nasty mom who forced her daughters into an unwanted marriage, the old-fashioned, arranged marriage. Sasha played the older daughter. My favorite game was the one that involved the made-belief guy named Koorosh, who fell in love with me. I was the daughter. Or maybe it was Sasha who fell in love. I can’t remember anymore. We loved that game so much we tried to make it into a series.
The house beach belonged to one of my other cousin’s. We loved that house. The beach was ours. The sea was ours. A whole yard of orange trees and tangerines. Barbecue in the afternoons. Nights were card games and dancing in bandary, the traditional southern dance.
And then there was the ocean, the sound of solitude and tranquility, wrapped inside the waves. We fell asleep to that. We woke up to that and there was nothing like it. Nothing like waking up and smelling fresh, salt water, eating homemade strawberry jam with sweet tea and fresh bread. Nothing like walking through those white gates, standing on the steps and watching the sea. Nothing like hearing your name through the waves.
Darya is everything. I think Leila should name her baby Darya and maybe we can tell her our stories of the sea.

Leaves in big, black garbage bags. Red, beaten, sorrowful, fallen leaves that my father plows and collects and dips into plastic bags. Leaves that are now the face of our lawn, our backyard and deck. As the winds pick up speed, I see the leaves dancing in the air, gathering dust. I toast my bagel, wait for the water to boil so I can make tea, and watch the dance from inside. I feel closer to what gathers behind the windowsills than to what I hold myself against inside the house. I feel closer to autumn and the winds and the leaves than to the rug under my feet, the room that has yet to warm, and the unfurnished walls. And winter is inevitably coming. I am afraid it will take away what little I have left behind the doors. I am afraid that the grass, along with the auburn leaves will disappear beneath the snow, melting, fading.
My father loves this house. Sometimes I think it was his dream, having a house for his children. He wears a sweater, refusing to take his winter coat out of the closet, puts on his gardening gloves and goes into the winds, his perfect, grey hair rising up. He gathers the leaves and dips them into plastic bags and keeps going until he tires down. I see him walking in, a fainted smile on his mouth, taking off the gloves and smoothing his hair. And he says nothing of the wind or how it hit him hard in the face. He says nothing of his sorrows, of the past that he now can throw out like the garbage bags. He says nothing, but that he is tired and wants a cup of tea.
We’ve left eight bags, full of recovered leaves, right by the mailbox. Someone will pick them up tomorrow, these heavy bags of the unwanted. And my father will do another round of plowing with my mother.

I hated the autumn leaves, falling flat on my face, those pestering red leaves. I hated the winds that cut my face and burned my lips. I hated the trees that my mother loved and enthusiastically begged me to see. They were trees. I had seen them before. I hated the wide roads because they reminded me of the suburbs of Iran. We call them roosta, the little villages where people dress in colorful, hand-made clothes and milk cows. I hated Virginia and never understood why it was for lovers. I hated winter. Winter trapped us inside the dingy apartment we had just rented. I hated being an immigrant, being so fucking flawed and misunderstood by everyone who wasn’t Iranian. I hated being mispronounced. I repeated my name so many times that I forgot which syllable was supposed to get the emphasis. It’s hilarious now, when I think that I couldn’t even remember how to pronounce it anymore. But it wasn’t funny then.
I hated shopping at cheap stores and not even knowing the damn labels. I hated that my mother tried to make everything okay and that my father worked at 7-eleven on the night shifts. I hated that he would never wear a suit again and work in an office which a bunch of pompous, narcissist men. I hated that my father was so damn in love with America that he wouldn’t even consider going back to his hellhole.
I hated school. I hated that my hair was short, that I looked like a boy and had a difficult name. I hated Mrs. Brady, my seventh grade chorus teacher, who just didn’t get it when I said I didn’t know what the hell she was talking about. I hated that she made us sing Jingle Bell. Even now when I hear Jingle Bell, I want to curse because it makes me feel lame.
I hate how much I have grown to love this place, to call it home. I hate that America is now mine; that it always was. I hate that I am bound to the leaves and trees and everything green around me. I hate that fall is about to end and that the leaves are dispersed on the lawn, no longer floating in my hair, or falling on my face.

Nothing speaks.
My mother calls me for dinner. She says I look thin. She says I should eat fruits and broccoli.
I have told her, over and over, that I hate broccoli. Broccoli is too green, too hard. It’s tasteless and the smell of it makes me sick. I hate it.
Nothing speaks.
My sister says why don’t you get a job. I tell her I don’t like anything. The mall depresses me. Retail is sickening because I can’t pretend to care for what people want to buy. I can’t pretend I like a dress that looks ugly and shouldn’t be sold to anyone.
Nothing speaks.
My father reads the online news because technology has changed. He falls asleep often, his head resting on the keyboard. I call and say dad, why don’t you sleep on the couch. He goes back to reading. If he calls me it’s because I forgot to turn the lights off in my room. Don’t you know how much we pay for electricity now?
Nothing speaks.
My room gets more disorganized every week. I try to go through old papers and throw them out. Then I realize I need them. I just don’t know where to place them anymore. I am still getting used to this new room.
The old room spoke. My walls were happier. They were softer, whiter.
People spoke.
Now,
Everyone gathers in the kitchen downstairs with a laptop in front of his face.
Nothing speaks.
I don’t even speak. It’s like my lungs are tired of taking a breath for words and my body is building up muscle because I work out so much and I am too tired to think.
272 words. I am speaking two hundred and seventy words but I am not saying anything. I am not trying. I am taking the easy way out. I am not writing. This isn’t writing.
Nothing speaks.
Nothing speaks DAMN it.
I miss inspiring people. I have lost the ability to inspire. And I find that sad. Slap me. Tell me to stop nagging and start finding something real. You know what my horoscope said today, it said I should stop dreaming and start working towards a real goal. I laughed and said screw you.
I’m wondering if I am dreaming again.
Nothing speaks.
I take a hot shower. My showers take an hour sometimes because this house is so fucking cold that the blood stops circulating in my ears. I take a long, burning hot shower and cry because I can’t think of a reason why I feel so damn tired.
I just broke my nail that had grown so nicely. And now I feel like cutting all of them, making them as ugly as I can.
I wonder how people see me. I’ll tell you what I think. I think they think I’m pretty, but mean and insecure. I wonder if that’s how they see me.
I wonder what it would be like to be a real writer.

The clock was pushed back an hour and my father was happy because he had an extra hour to spend his day with. On his off-days, my father likes to solve puzzles, browse the web for Persian news, walk around the house, eat ice cream and drink tea. Today, he collected dead leaves that covered our lawn. I helped him put them away in large, plastic bags, and we did this over and over, until I got tired and left. The leaves made me sad because they were pretty, red, green and yellow, but now rotten, waste. And I was sad to see my father there, bending down, and rising back up, his gloved hands full of dead leaves. I wondered if the house still felt foreign to him, if the arduous housework bothered him, if he minded clearing the grass of dirty leaves. I should ask him, why have I not asked him this?
We will get used to it. We’ll get used to turning off the lights, and locking the many doors, and maybe we’ll even sit in the living room one day instead of the kitchen, where we sit and eat and talk and do homework and check our emails.
My father came back inside, and it felt like it’d been hours. He was tired, but still holding a weary smile. He wasn’t even wearing a jacket, not even a sweater on a windy November afternoon. We poured him tea, and that’s how we spent the rest of the day, drinking tea, and answering the phone, and reading the paper. My mother did the laundry and sewed the curtains in my sister’s room and I bought the groceries and washed dishes. And Sunday was over, and it didn’t matter that the hour was pushed back because we still stayed up late, getting ready for tomorrow and the day after that, and the day after that.

The nights are better, now that we have had rain. No one picked up the trash, so the garbage bags, cans and plastics, still sit underneath tree branches, wet and silky. The house is still too big, foreign to our senses. Hearing hefty raindrops, caressing the rooftop against wood surprises us. We stop what we are doing to hear thunder and admire our new home. My sister pours coffee into a striped mug, beaming under the kitchen lights, unafraid of the storm that delves our walls.
The nights are better, now that we are filled. The stairs are still an effort, and the floor is cold and unfurnished, stale and rugged. My feet agonize as I make my way over to the bed, where I find a new kind of warmth, pleasing after a long time. I role on my side, listen to what is now the soundtrack of my sleep, and hope to fall, deep down.
The nights are better.
Now that we are.

It’s been a while since I’ve sat down to put thoughts on here.
Many nights I want to put a bullet through the thin layer of thoughts that deteriorate the cells in my brain and slow down my heart.
Many nights I walk down the stairs, careful of my coarse feet against the tin floor. I make my way to the kitchen that still has the stain of coffee on the wooden cabinets. I feel the tainted cold in between my toes while the house sleeps, hear an echo of mid-night, of the keys that lie on the counter, of the pot that boiled hours ago. I swallow a bite of left-over food and wander, in between nothingness and silence, drifting away from my reflection in the glass windows that encircle me. I rest on my mother’s seat, still warm, and watch the magenta leaves of Mr. and Mrs. Byron’s garden.
Many nights I don’t intend to do the petty, tiring, night things like brushing my teeth and pulling the heavy covers over my head. Many nights I want to slip out of my skin and walk barefoot on the new lawn, the wet, unfamiliar grass, sit on the patterned swing and fall into silence, gone like everyone else…
Many nights I continue the endlessness of my day-dreams, the sad breathing and become a fainted brush stroke of ink.
I put a bullet through the thin layer of my thoughts, through my damaged soul and write fresh, about what it feels to feel again…
Many nights I don’t bother with poetry because I find it disrupting to reality, to the simple fact that I’ve been alone for a long time, and still have a hard time making it through the hours. I think of sleep the way a child does about a pony.
Many nights, I go to bed, my teeth brushed carelessly, my body half under.

The new house in Cedar smells foreign, but sweet. We discover a piece of it everyday, doors that open to storage rooms, closets and windows. Baba says the kitchen is big enough to dance in as Maman and I dance to an old Persian song, singing softly. Paria, who is the main character in the song, is told not to go to the kooche. She has to be careful of the boys for they might take her away and steal her lover’s heart.
Maman and Baba are happier, perhaps because change is good. My sister smiles more as she walks barefoot on the cold, delicate parquet. The stairs are sharp on the edges, and Baba has to be careful when he gets up at dawn to leave for work. I worry about him taking the stairs.
This house, our house, is gentle, akin to every other place we left. The rooms are dry, cotton-like. Waking up in them is easy; sun doesn’t beam too much, but still, I sleep and I’m hollow, which is good.
I feel like I don’t have to make sense in a place like this, where there is room for all the things I never got to do. We don’t have to make sense for this home to be ours. It already is. It already speaks, makes small talk and puts us to bed at night.
Change is good; it makes us forget. Change distracts us from the hackneyed, from the old, from the rotten phases of ordinary days. Driving on Cedar lane, parking in front of a door that’s ours, walking up the rough stairs to find ourselves facing a new stranger, are the things that we do these days. We needed to find a bigger dream, somewhere where we could set up tables in every corner, or lay the silverware and arrange all the plates. Somewhere where we could hold ourselves, together and within.
Maybe we will change. Maybe we have already begun to see a new side of our old selves. But there is a sense of satisfaction, a sense of entitlement in owning something bigger than our dreams. There is something in Maman’s voice that tells me things are going to be okay. There is something in father’s hello that tells me we are going to be fine.

When you empty a room, and rid of all posters, the dusty tired picture frames, the cobwebs that you weren’t even aware of, there is something that hits you inside. You hear your voice, echoing back from the walls, from the disdained emptiness of yourself. And you wonder if all you ever did, right here, in this little room, was worth doing. You wonder if anything will be remembered.
Box after box, layer after layer, and we are moving on again, and again. And although we are no longer strangers in our own skin, although we’ve built on and have learned to let go, still, there is a funny sadness from the bruised walls.
The fog suffocates us, me and these broken memories. The clock ticks and the sound echoes back. I write, for a last time, within this space.

Night drags for those who left, but for us ends because we get tired of standing awake, driving along in traffic with sirens and watchdog cops. For us, the days are too little, yet we complain because they feel long and unnecessary. When we stand in line, pulling out our wallets, staring at strangers who push their carts around aisles, aimlessly and yet out of necessity, we think we’ve been standing there for hours, stilled in time.
I feel like that sometimes. I don’t mind traffic too much. I like resting my arms on the wheel and staring into the rearview mirror at drivers who think they can’t be seen. One time I looked and a lady in white hair blew a bubble, a funny thing I laughed at. But time drags when I wait for a dim coffee, or in checkout grocery lines or for my mother to cook us lunch.
I imagine for soldiers it’s different. Night and day are the same. Nights drag into days and days become endless nights. I imagine they wait longer. I imagine they sleep less. They must drag themselves with time, fighting an absurd war against confused men.
No one’s bulletproof. No one’s armed against inhumane hurricanes.
I imagine he didn’t dream to one day blow up into pieces of thin air to be a called a hero.
No one’s bulletproof.
Day and night, I wonder when we’ll leave in peace, the sounds of sirens and guns and blood covered instead by silence.
I don’t write war. I never lived through one. I don’t know how it feels, and maybe I am not entitled to imagine such unimaginable crimes. But I am a person and in my head I have thoughts that need to speak. There is a need for me to begin my day and end it, just so I can start all over.