I ask her why she is tired. I ask her what worries her. She looks at me and I already know. She is tired of always being the grown up of the house, the one who watches out for Dad, the one who cooks, cleans, provides rides for her little sister. She has always played the role of the second mother. She tells me she never got to be a child, a child who could play without worrying about her little brother, a child who could play without wondering when mother would return.
She is eight and mother is gone. For the next five years, mother will be away. The little girl begins to feel responsible for what her brothers do, for what happens in the house. She begins to think that if something goes wrong it will be her responsibility to fix it. But she is only eight. She should be careless, free of guilt, free of blame. Suddenly she sees herself growing up. In her little mind, she is already a grown up who tries to fill the space of her absent mother. Someone forgets to tell her that she is a child and doesn’t need to worry. Someone forgets to remind her that she shouldn’t feel responsible. Someone forgets to tell her that all she has to do is play with her dolls, clean after herself, wash her teeth before bedtime and do her homework. No one ever does. And she grows up without ever having a childhood. Mother returns but her baby daughter is too grown up, too mature to yell at her for being gone for so long, too old to cry or whine or ask for a new pair of shoes.Taking care of others eventually becomes her job and she never forgets to reach out to others and give them her hand.
I cannot look into her broken eyes, eyes that have seen beyond their years, eyes that have been impaired beyond repair. Beneath her fragile figure is a strong woman, a woman of beauty, passion, and courage, a woman who I will always look up to.

I am standing on the mall’s roof, right next to the movie theater. I have just gotten out of work and I’m waiting for her to pick me up. The soles of my feet ache and I feel as though I’m sinking into the depths of the ground. My music plays in my ears and I’m watching couples enter the AMC. I have my arms stretched out, my back against the edge, like those who are about to smoke. But I’m a girl with no cigarette, no beer can. Beside my purse of personal belongings, I’m empty handed; I possess nothing. And I’m the loneliest stranger.

It’s a hot summer day in Tehran and mom is asleep in her room. I am eight and tired of playing with Barbie dolls. Outside I hear the namaki, a guy who sells nothing but salt and in return collects dry bread. He shouts, “namaki, namaki” so even those in the middle of their nap can hear him. I hear the wheels of his cart as he pushes it from kooche to kooche, street to street, under the burning afternoon sun. I open the window and look down below; the namaki man is passing by, the front of his cart filled with bags of salt, the back with dry bread. I am scared of him because he wears torn clothes and wanders the endless kooches, shouting in a loud tone. He is a stranger who may have a wife and child waiting for him somewhere. But he means nothing to me. I am just a child in need of a game to break myself away from boredom. The sound of his cart wheels diminishes until I no longer hear him. Mom wakes up and makes tea. I watch her drink it and go back to playing with a Barbie doll that is slim like a model, with beautiful blond hair. But unlike most little girls, I never secretly want to be her. She is just a doll, like the namaki man who is just a stranger selling salt.
But as I sit here today, my Barbie dolls crammed into a suitcase on a shelf, the namaki man miles away in another continent, I suddenly miss them. I miss hearing the namaki’s cart wheels. I miss our kooche and the view from the roof top. I miss the indefatigable construction workers who built block after block from dawn to dusk. I picture these images in my head, these small but priceless memories of the past.
I drink my tea and listen to James Blunt. Iran is too far away now and there is not a single sound that will trace back those summer days when I was a child listening to the namaki, the man who sold salt.

I pick a French baguette as I realize we’ve run out of bread and wish to pick a bottle of red wine as an addition to my short shopping list. A bottle of wine to add some flavor to a flavorless meal. But in a society of rules and regulations, I simply cannot. Back home where the curtains are shut and the lights are dimmed, my father meticulously cuts the baguette into smaller pieces. Though night has already fallen and another day has terminated, my unfinished story sits still on a table and uncompleted thoughts run through my head. I eat a neatly cut piece of the French baguette and watch the orange moon that is my only source of light. I wonder if that bottle of red wine would have made this night any different. I wonder if it would have pleased me enough so I could ignore the unsettling facts of the simple life I lead. I wonder, and the moon grows fainter, no longer lighting the room. The moon has betrayed me and I’m now trapped in darkness as night wraps itself around me, like a well-fitted coat that tightly holds you against your skin.

I step into my orthodontist’s office and Dr. B greets me with the same smile he greeted me with six years ago. Six years ago he smiled to a shy girl, a new immigrant whose hopes of America were nothing like those of her parents. A girl who wore a thin, disheveled scarf around her head, an oversized turtleneck and a pair of jeans, and whose smile was only out of respect and curtsey. She was too embarrassed to correct her name when it was mispronounced, a humiliation she could not bare. The day she met Dr. B and his happy, friendly assistants, who smiled too often and too greatly, she was horrified to learn that her braces were not acceptable and that they had to be redone. She was discomforted when one of the nurses took her photo and she had to force yet another smile, exposing the metal wires in her mouth. She was further distraught by the fast English spoken around her. But despite the horrors of that visit, she never forgot the sincerity of Dr. B’s smile, one that was like a promise, a promise that said everything would be okay, that time would pass and those braces would eventually come off. Unlike other patients, her concern was not due to painful doctor visits, but to the foreignness of their faces, the strangeness of their language and the difference of their appearance.
Somehow the promise I saw in Dr. B’s eyes on that first visit was not broken. Everything did work out; the braces came off and became a distant memory, along with all my bad feelings about America. My name continued to be troubling but I didn’t mind correcting it. And now today, sitting in his office as a mature, 18 year-old young woman, I feel no different than the other patients here who are waiting to be checked. I thank him, though he doesn’t know that I’m not only thanking him for what he’s done for me as a faithful doctor, but also because of his promising smile on that November afternoon when I was timid and humiliated by a mispronounced name.

Yesterday I sold my wedding ring and then rushed to the bank to put the money in my savings. Today I am on a plane with Lolita, heading to Manhattan for an interview with the New York Times. The sun is out and the temperature is perfect. Lolita has her head in a book and I am reading an article in the Times. I have promised her a happy life in New York. I have promised us Broadway shows on Saturday nights and shopping adventures on 5th avenue. I have promised things that he never thought of promising. The little things that make life beautiful, the little things that my daughter will cherish for the rest of her life. I once gave him my heart, but now I’m giving it to the city, to myself and to my little Lo.
We are now walking in Central Park and Lo is enjoying the sun. I could not have asked for a better setting, a better temperature, a better picture. I don’t believe in happy endings and I’m not going to promise Lo such a thing. But I do believe that we will make the best of what we get, that we will watch out for each other, that we will make it through the busy streets, that we will make it through honking taxis and crazy drivers. I hold her arm and we cross the street, where a man is selling hot dog. I take a few bills out of my purse and hand Lo a piece. The hot dog man smiles. I smile back and head for the metro; I can’t wait to show Lo our first apartment in the middle of the city. I can’t wait to unpack my bags and go under new covers. I can’t wait to sleep to the sound of motorbikes and everything else that the city will reveal.
The End

A month has passed and we have forgotten her face, her small talks, her laughter and her anger. We have forgotten what makes her giggle, what makes her laugh, what makes her smile and what makes her frown. Her empty seat at the table and her absence in every corner of this house has left us nostalgic, longing for her warm embrace, her gentle touch. There are days that we simply sleep without thinking of her, without noticing the absence of her smell, the absence of her voice.
Mother is coming back soon. And we will forget she was once gone. What happened yesterday will only be a distant memory, one that will soon be forgotten.

On these endless summer days, where I ride the bus to work and listen to the same songs, and continue day dreaming, life is grand. I mean the world is literally at my fingertips. I can order a tall Caramel Macchiato with my credit card and I can buy a great book, like Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake. The possibilities are endless here in America. And yet I haven’t taken my chances at everything. I’ve lived a life too safe, too risk-free, too…secure. I went from shy freshman girl to a sassy senior, which was a big improvement, but not quite enough. It was not the biggest jump. The jump I’m still willing to make. I’m living the American dream; I’m a writer. But I have not yet played around with my own rules the way I play around with words. I’m good at taking risks with the string of words that somehow make sense, but I have failed to take those risks in my own reality.
It only takes one jump. And I will be free.

I gave in. Once again, I became weak and I gave in. I had refused to marry him for months but I finally said yes when he proposed during breakfast one early morning. I didn’t find his proposal particularly romantic, but for some reason, in between my last bite of butter and cream on toast, I found myself saying yes to a man I loved too much. I liked the idea of being someone’s wife; in a weird way that I still find odd today, I liked the feeling of being possessed. But at the time when I was 21 and too young, I thought possession was the same thing as love. I thought that him having me for himself would mean he would love me endlessly. The funniest thing about this marriage was that I had been against the concept my whole life. I had been so set on not ever getting married because I was simple and a marriage seemed too complicated. I used to think that a happy life with someone I loved would be enough, no strings attached. But I had also been logical, cautious, and never a risk taker. And this was my one chance to break my own rules. It was my one chance to take a big risk, forget my better judgment, and ignore the rules I had once so perfectly drawn out for myself.
I finished my toast and couldn’t stop staring at the diamond ring on my finger, the ring that was meant to map our love for eternity, for better or for worse, in sickness and in heath, ‘till death did us part. But of course I didn’t think of any of those customs. I just looked at, thinking and believing that I had taken a risk, and that I had freed myself of boundaries and limits. I was too young, too young to know that the man in front of me was in love with something else, that he was doing what he thought was his duty. He was a boy who wanted to be a man, a husband, a caretaker of a fragile, insecure portrait of a wife.

The man in front of me looks about 70. He has fitted himself between two women, and is resting his hand on a black umbrella, carefully reading a piece of paper. He is wearing a white bow tie, a hat, and a suit. I want to call him the umbrella man. Next to the umbrella man, is the saddest, most insecure and introverted woman. A loose scarf is wrapped around her head. She is wearing jeans and sneakers underneath a long dress. She shyly glances around, but keeps her head down most of the time. I notice no rings on her slender fingers so I know she doesn’t belong to anyone. I feel as though on this rainy day, where traffic is slow, the grounds are wet, and all the lights are red, everybody is trapped in misery. And I’m just like them. I’m another miserable rider of this bus, and I’m looking for a story. I have run out of stories just like I have run out of songs. Everything these days is a rerun. The bus rides, the songs in my head, my fantasies, the cigarette lady who I see for the second time; it’s as if I’m living the same day over and over again. But let me go back to the people in the bus. The bus driver is a woman in her mid 30s. She is also carrying a yellow umbrella with her and she doesn’t enjoy driving on wet roads. Her smile is the fading kind because she’s had a long day and unlike me, she has many destinations to stop at. For her, life is a series of bus stops, of people getting on and off the bus, of dollars and quarters that fill the coin machine, of people who look for seats closest to the doors. These people, the ones who like to sit close to the doors, don’t take risks; they want to be safe. They don’t want attention so they sit somewhere where they can easily get out, with no hassle. I’m one of these people. I sit right next to the door so I can watch each face that comes in, so I can watch the roads, but most importantly because I’m insecure. I’m afraid that if I sit away from the doors, I’ll never get off the bus or that I’ll miss my stop.
I know there are more stories to be told. I know that the bus is not just about the cigarette lady or the umbrella man or that shy, innocent woman with the scarf. But, I like to wander off to my own world and become the shy, innocent girl with the head phones. That’s simply who I am on this bus. I’m a girl who can easily pretend that the life she is living, right now, right here in this bus, is nothing more than a movie, a comedy of happy, lonely people.