The burial was yesterday. They buried him yesterday. Yesterday, when we woke up, he had already been buried under the earth, in Tehran, the land the rest of us left behind.
I wasn’t sure when I would see him again, but I knew that I would. I didn’t think that I wouldn’t have the chance because you don’t think about people dying. You think you have time, but one more morning everything changes. He is dead.
I am going to keep missing him, except this time I won’t be able to tell him that I miss him. I think the last time I heard his voice on the phone was last March for the Iranian new year.
I don’t usually write about death because it never really happened this hard. The last time death happened was when I was 5, so that wasn’t hard. So I never wrote about it. This is me trying to write about it. I think I am failing.
But it’s different this time. I really feel it now. I feel kind of empty now, the sadness drenched in my body, almost turning into vapor. Every morning since Tuesday it hits a different way. Yesterday, I was angry. Today, I am just silent. I don’t want to speak. I wish I didn’t have to eat. I would like to just sleep, but I can’t fall asleep.
Everyone has to go one day, my aunt said when I gave my condolence. I felt pathetic, calling after a year to say I am sorry my uncle is dead. I apologized to her for not being there, but that also seemed pathetic.
It is pathetic to live and then die. I just don’t get it.

When you immigrate, the part you leave behind the most is not your land, but the people. When we said our goodbyes, we knew we were taking the risk of never seeing them again.
When we were little, our uncle used to make funny faces and pretend to scare us. He would pretend to play the guitar on our arms, sometimes the violin. He’d press his fingers hard against our arms and we giggled from laughter. But his favorite game was to give us pretend names, names we’d never heard of, often made up from his imagination. He’d start with, “from today on, your name is…” and we begged him not to pick something horrible. I don’t remember a time that he didn’t make us laugh. He joked so often that my aunt had to stop him before he even began speaking.
Eight years ago, I visited him and saw him for the last time. Today, he died. I hadn’t heard his voice in a long time, but I remember the sound of his voice. Whenever I called from the States, I always told him how much I missed him and I still do, and always will. That’s the hardest part of immigration; there are certain things you lose that you will never get back.
We constantly leave. We leave certain memories behind, and continue to miss what we’ve forever left behind. But it is uncertain when the the time comes. And when the phone calls come, it is often too late. Too late to say goodbye, too late to forgive yourself for leaving.

My mother’s job is to forget, to bury her memories deep into the folds of her clothes, the wrinkles around her eyes. My job is to unravel them, unwrap those lost memories. I remember my childhood vividly. I know what my mother looked like then, how she acted, how her voice quivered less when she sang. We used to share the same space. I played where she worked on her embroidery. Often, she sang, without introduction, without explanation. She sang and I listened and I never questioned her. It became a tune my ears grew to associate with love and sadness. She sang with love, but there was deep sadness buried underneath, in the lyrics, in her voice. At nights, after my father had left, I slept next to her. I never feared anything on those nights. In the mornings, I wanted to stay in bed even long after she had gotten up to make breakfast. She had a red velvet robe that she wore often, a gift from my father, I think. As a kid, I liked seeing her wear it. She kept it neatly in her little closet and on occasion, when she was away, I’d slip it on.
My mother has forgotten most of her life before the age of 50. She has brief moments of recognition. Sometimes, she’ll hear a certain song and she’ll either smile or ask me to change it. Forgetting and remembering are both skills we all share or lack. My brother and I are both good at remembering our childhoods and the people in them. My mother and sister remember little, and what little they remember is so faint that it might as well not be a memory.
It’s not that I live in the past. My childhood is certainly over and nostalgia is here to linger forever in my dreams and thoughts. But from remembering, I can relate to my family, to people I’ve lost and loved. I can recall how I was, and sometimes it’s easier to understand my current inner conflicts. But for people like my mother, the past has no meaning and there is no point in going back or in nostalgia. In fact, I don’t think my mother is nostalgic. Her wish to have been a singer is not nostalgia, but just a lost dream. She is too practical to let nostalgia in. She may not be a singer, but she has more success at 61 than her teenage years and her teenage dreams.
Forgetting is not an easy thing for me. I am plagued with the desire to write and remember. The losses are piling up in my book of nostalgia, the people, the places, all the things happened then. I am going to remember everything because I am free, like my mother is now.

Dad called my cell today around 7 pm. I almost panicked. He never calls, especially not from his cell. He told me he and Mom are driving to Maryland to visit relatives. He sounded happy and said I sounded better than usual. I am doing fine, aren’t I, he wanted to know. I said sure, now that I hear you Dad I am much better. He asked if I had dinner yet. He has never asked me that before.
Now talk your Mother, he says. My mother asks if I am chewing on something. Chips, I say. She says, I thought so. Suddenly there is a break of silence and I ask what happened? A truck just zoomed by us, too close, she says. I gasp and for a moment, I am terribly frightened of the possibility.
We say goodbye, happily reminding each other that I will see them soon for Thanksgiving. And then I sit on my bed and think about them. Recently, I call home seldom, way less than previous semesters. I am not busy. I just don’t want to sound so disappointing all the time. I like to wait for a time that I am actually happy, but that’s almost never. So in order to not disappoint her, I don’t call and hope that she does. Sometimes she does, even if we both aren’t talkers on the phone.
What I like about her is that she often remembers to say, “Look, you always figure it out, so just don’t worry so much.”
And then, she laughs. She has this comforting laugh, small, not too loud, not too big, just enough to reassure me.

At age 10, I stepped into a life outside of Iran for the first time. With two suitcases each, Mom and I arrived in October to the cold city of Brussels. There was no American embassy in Tehran so in addition to seeing my brother, Mom hoped we could get visas to see my father in the States.
The skies looked bigger, the streets seemed wider, the air smelled cleaner. A subway train ran in front of my brother’s apartment building on Rue de la Brasserie. It was 1998 and Iran had not yet built a subway system. In the one-bedroom apartment, Mom and I nestled on the small sofa bed with multiple blankets to keep ourselves warm. There was no heater so I shivered every time I went to bed. Under layers of blankets, I fixated my eyes on the unfamiliar and new ceiling.
Whenever we could, the three of us walked. Mom and I took charge of the laundry. As the temperatures dropped, we had a harder time walking to the Laundromat, even though it was just a block away. In Tehran, we had our own washing machine. Grocery shopping opened a whole new world for me. I pushed the cart, begging for more chocolate and biscuits, and all sorts of things that I had not seen in Tehran. There, Mom bought her produce and bread from an individual deli and bakery. The only large supermarket was at least an hour drive and since we didn’t have a car, we rarely shopped there.
When we came back after grocery shopping at Delhaize, we climbed two flights of steep stairs in a very narrow stairway, always out of breath when we reached the top. The building was small and dingy, the air hardly breathable. Mom hated it. When I was older, she told me that those three months were unbearable because she couldn’t accept that her oldest son was living under such circumstances. She hated being a burden, occupying his small space and having him take time away from work to entertain us, play the part of tour guide. While Mom lived with guilt, I basked in pleasure. I loved every minute of my long vacation.
For the first time, I witnessed public displays of affection. On a train ride home, I watched the reflection of a couple French kissing in the window and couldn’t stop staring. They were tall, much taller than people in Tehran, and blond. They seemed to be glued together, their mouths one entity. I was disgusted, yet intrigued.
During the weekends, the three of us walked to Place Flagey Square. The weeping willow branches floated on top of the lake. Towards the end of the park, there was a big palace museum. I took my brother’s hand as we crossed the grass and made our way to the palace. His firm hand reassured me that we were okay, that somehow it was normal for me to be in a new country and not responsible for anything. I noticed how everything was greener, how the lake was clear, inviting and pleasant.
In Iran, the closest water was the Caspian Sea, at least an hour and a half drive from Tehran up north. With my brother in that great grand field, everything appeared before me like an illusion, like a beautiful dream. I didn’t know of nostalgia so I lived those moments fully, even while knowing their transience. I wasn’t naïve to think my family would reunite, that we’d all go back to Iran and be the way we were. I was just hopeful, happy.
Though the skies were often gloomy, I loved looking out the bedroom window. Instead of hearing the Islamic Azan, a religious chant, I heard church bells from the Saint Antoine Church. Listening to the bells everyday was a strange experience, like I had stepped into a movie that I hadn’t read the script for. The unfamiliarity of the echoing sound, the way the church stood tall and dark, all became memories I held onto years later. I coped with it. I listened and looked for it. When we finally left, I longed for it.
The three months I lived in Brussels would be the last time I experienced happiness in childhood. I knew Mom and I would not live there permanently since we had plans for America. There was no pressure to blend in. I didn’t have to learn French or go to school and assimilate. I walked the streets holding onto Mom’s cold fingertips, never looking up to see her anguish and sadness.
Though we never got our visas at the end of the trip, I remembered Brussels as my first experience in a new world, open, free and mesmerizing. I admired my brother’s courage to settle in a new place, learn the language and build a new life.
Since then, immigration, the move to new places, the longing for the unfamiliar became not only my life, but also my obsession. I was never able to create the simple bliss of the months in Brussels, but I continued to search for experiences, discoveries, and later, for home.

Sometimes I am not sure which language to write in: English or Farsi. When I miss Tehran, whatever is left of it in my memories, I like to think about it in Farsi. I like to remember names and naturally I’d rather write them in Farsi, but my thoughts are so American now, my words and feelings that sometimes, it won’t justify to write in Farsi. Such an irony, to have to write about your native land in a foreign language.
When you are trapped in two, it’s hard to pick one, both incomplete, both insufficient to how you actually feel inside, the pains you go through to correct and retry and rewrite and rethink. The act of translation is tiring. The thinking of the two together, wrapped in one, wrapped in the insides of my clothes, my body, my head, is exhausting. When I am trapped in the subway trains in Manhattan, I think about the weight of the two worlds and sometimes, I have trouble breathing. When we pass other trains so fast that for a second we might almost collide, I think of death– will my last thought be in Farsi, in my native tongue, or will it be English or will it possibly be the little bit of Spanish that still lingers in the back of my head. Such a strange thing to know languages and yet not know yourself, what you want, what you are eventually going to become.
For years I have been assimilating my mind, my body, my being to this American living, this way of existence. I have been training myself to speak flawless English, to write poetically and lyrically and get away with my shortcomings of the language. I have done the transition so well that I can almost forget about it, forget all the trouble I went through, all the times I cried because I couldn’t understand, because I not only lacked culture, but language. I can almost forget when I am with others, with Americans, with friends, laughing, joking, being sarcastic about my life. But alone, inside the subway, in classrooms, in my mind, I always remember that the struggle is not yet over, that there are still parts of me that haven’t accepted the new me, haven’t quite forgiven the old, the one that made mistakes and has now filled my mind with memories of shame and embarrassment.
I write in English and in Farsi. I sing in Farsi and when I do, I feel a better connection. While singing, I don’t need to understand all. I can project it out loud, my fears, my anger, my love and frustration for Iran, for Farsi, for that childhood sweetness that becomes smaller and smaller as I get older, as I assimilate. When I sing, I am free of questions, of doubts about what I am. I am just a voice, an expression of thought.
In the everyday existence, it matters where I am from. I am okay with that. I don’t mind telling you. But it is exhausting when it becomes the only thing, the most interesting thing about you. And yet what would I be if not what I came from? I wouldn’t be so interesting, so intertwined and complex and tormented, would I?
Every year, it’s more unwrapping, more thinking, more getting older and trying to figure out what it is I am. I am not sure I will ever master either language, but I know that I will forever be tied to both. I will be tied to the ocean that separates me from my native land.

My mother sold my childhood home. The summer I was 18 and graduated from high school, Mom flew from Virginia to Tehran for my brother’s wedding and shortly after, called me and my sister Ra to tell us they sold our apartment. My brother and Mom both decided that since he was getting married and needed more privacy from our family-owned building, it was time for him to move.
I looked at Ra in disbelief. She burst out crying on the phone and said, in between sobs, “Couldn’t you wait Mom? Couldn’t you at least have discussed it with us?”
Mom said, “We don’t live there anymore. It had to be done; your brother had made up his mind.”
We hung up the phone and I thought about our apartment in Tehran. Thirty-four years ago, Dad and his brother bought the land and watched it built from scratch. Dad took the third floor; my uncle moved in with his wife on the first, right above the basement and the garden and the little pool, their mother lived on the second and when she passed, my older brother and cousin took her place. My aunt planted the garden and by the time I was 10, a tall walnut tree grew as high as our floor. Each floor had a balcony that overlooked the garden and the pool. On the rooftop, we ate watermelon in the summer, all the first and second cousins sitting around a tablecloth with pillows against the edges, watching the city around us, the Alborz Mountains in the North and hearing the Azan at night from the mosque. My uncle would knife the melon and cut it into equal pieces and we’d eat it with our hands, washing them later with the hose.
We had lots of gatherings on the Third Floor, birthdays, funerals, and then later goodbye parties for those immigrating to the States.
In our kitchen, Mom made blackberry jam once every summer. During Ramadan (when we still believed in God), we ate Sahari (the first meal) at dawn by the round yellow table that faced the oven. When I was little, I didn’t fast, but once I tried it just so I could sit with my siblings and eat a meal with them. Mom made rice with chicken and then we had tea afterwards, all of us feeling a bit queasy and going right back to bed. The kitchen tiles were white, and Mom made sure they stayed that way. Once a month, she washed the entire kitchen with a hose, emptied every single cabinet, washed the floor, the fridge and the windows until the place sparkled.
My childhood space was the dining room—we called it the Big Room because it was bigger than the living room and fit a lot of people. Because I shared a room with Ra, I didn’t have room for my toys and dolls so Mom let me place them in the cabinets inside the Big Room. I even had a key so I could lock them up when I didn’t want other kids to touch them while I was gone. I played in the Big Room when the adults weren’t around. I prayed there too or pretended when I was six, seven and eight and still hadn’t learned to pray at school. Mom bought me a small sized veil and I assumed different titles in my made up games—my favorite role was the schoolteacher where I wore the veil extra tight to make sure not a single hair showed, just like my teachers. I brought playmates in the Big Room, mostly my second cousins. Once we had a sleepover and saw the moon, full-circle and bright shining into the Big Room from the window. It’s an image I never forget, both frightening and comforting as my eight year-old mind raced with thoughts about what it would be like to grow up and move outside the walls of the Big Room.
Mom sold our apartment on Negahban Street to strangers. After years of family occupants, after years of memories, of comings and goings, another family of six took the Third Floor. Our Third Floor. Ra and I didn’t speak much about it, other than to say, “Bavaram nemisheh, I can’t believe it” over and over again like repeating it would somehow make sense out of it.
For eleven years I had loved that house and to this day, when I close my eyes, I can see everything, every detail, every object, even the single moments that the six of us lived there as a family. In our apartment in Virginia, I had nothing to love. Everything we owned, from the sofa to the dining room table to the television looked second-hand, the bare essentials of living bought from a cheap store with discount. Even the Indian rug wore out after a few weeks and lost its color. There was nothing permanent about our one-bedroom apartment, nothing admiring, nothing that even matched.
No matter how assimilated you become, you are always an immigrant, attached to your first home. I had just learned that my only home had now been sold to strangers who would never share the same memories. There was no going back now, I thought. Where would I go if I visited Tehran? How could I walk our street and not go up the stairs to the Third Floor? I imagined myself going back, kneeling behind the white door, touching the surface, knocking until the new occupants opened. Then I would yell for them to get out of my house, and I would lie in the Big Room and remember what it was like being a child.
“We don’t live there anymore,” Mom had said.
I realized later that when she sold the house, she had already moved on and willingly accepted her home in the States. She didn’t share my impermanence, my homelessness. She had taken away my safety and security, and expected me to love the new American home.
She thought that at 11 years old, I would understand that expectation.

When I go home, Dad is busy with his new iPad. Instead of doing mindless puzzles, he reads the news on his new gadget, and learns how to use his new email. He is now even more absent than before. I look for him as I search the house, and finally find him in the kitchen behind the table, his eyes focused on the iPad. We exchange a few sentences over the weekend when I go home briefly. Just a few sentences and then I hug him and leave as he is busy helping the guy who is fixing the sink. My father holds his dirty hands away from me as he hugs me and then I leave with my sister who drops me off at the bus station.
My mother spends her Saturday at Virginia Beach for a conference. She tries crab cake and wears her new dark blue jeans. She doesn’t believe in jeans at 61, but she wears them anyway, encouraged by her children who tell her they fit her fine and make her look younger. Unlike my father who hasn’t changed a whole lot personally, my mother is an entirely different woman. She manages the finances, maintains and updates her work’s website, has started meeting new people and even trying new foods.
I see them briefly. We don’t exchange a whole lot. She is barely there and I am trying to study. She doesn’t make me carrot cake, doesn’t give me food to take back to the city, but says she will miss me and can’t wait until Thanksgiving. I miss my mother and father, the two who brought me to this country and told me it was for the best. And now I am trying to make the “best” out of it and they think I am trying to leave them, that I don’t want to be part of the family.
I miss them, and sometimes I miss myself.

Once a year, around June or July, my mother made blackberry jam in the 95-degree Fahrenheit heat of Tehran in our kitchen. She never bought store jams because she believed they were overcooked and didn’t have the proper color or taste. So in the summer when blackberries were ripest, she walked to the nearest store a few blocks down Salimi Street, bought 10-15 pounds of fresh blackberries and carried them home. We lived on the third story of a family-owned apartment building. Mom walked up three flights of stairs with her blackberries in a black plastic bag. In the kitchen, she meticulously took the seeds out, poured the berries into a big copper pot, added sugar, a little bit of vanilla extract or cardamom, then left the blackberries to soak between two to four hours. When the juice began to form, she placed the pot on the stove until it boiled, then stirred for five minutes, turned off the stove and let it cool. She poured the jam into small jars and refrigerated them. Even days later, the sweet and sour smell enveloped the kitchen. My older siblings and I, eager to have a taste, couldn’t wait until breakfast the next day.
Mom always said that breakfast was the most important meal of the day. On school days, between the ages of seven and 10, the thing I enjoyed most was the 20 minutes that I drank sweet tea with fresh bread (Sangak, Barbary, Taftoon or French Baguette), Iranian cheese (white cheese that soaked in salty water), butter or cream with blackberry jam. Every morning, Mom prepared breakfast on the table. She woke up before seven, boiled the water, placed dry tea powder in the teapot and let it sit on the stove for about five to 10 minutes.
My family loved breakfast so much that we sometimes had it again for dinner. But throughout the day, the thing that remained constant was black tea. I drank mine sweet, but the adults (my parents and siblings) drank it bitter. Sometimes Mom added cardamom in the teapot for more flavor. She poured tea into crystal glasses with handles. Morning, afternoon, late afternoon, sundown, evening, even before bed, she made tea for everyone.
Sweet tea especially tasted good on winter days. I could see the snow on the Alborz Mountains; that was before they built all the taller apartments. No breakfast was served without tea—there was no such thing as running out. If Mom overslept, then Dad made it right before I left for school. Mom wore a loose scarf around her head, out of habit, and long-sleeved cotton shirts with khakis. I used to think making breakfast and homemade jam was a motherly thing, natural and innate. Only later, years later, I learned that it wasn’t about being selfless, but about having passion and interest. Mom had a real passion for that kind of thing; she didn’t do it just to make us happy. She would send one of my older brothers to get fresh bread almost every morning—that was the only thing we often ran out of. On winter days, Mom left the stove on so we could get warm. I wanted those minutes of warmth to last longer. I wanted to sit there, eat and stir my tea over and over again so I wouldn’t have to go to school, so I could savor the taste of blackberry jam and sweet tea.
On my walk to school, the only thing I would think about and keep picturing in my head was how peaceful our kitchen was. How Mom walked from the window to the fridge and back to the table so delicately, like she was floating. How she sat with me, through every bite and asked if I wanted more tea.
When we immigrated to Falls Church, Virginia, I eventually stopped taking sugar with tea. My parents and I made tea the hurried way: teabags. Occasionally when we had guests in our small one bedroom apartment on Manchester Street, Mom took the time to boil and prepare tea the Iranian way: dark, rich with a hint of cardamom. It seemed that with each year, we lost our motive to sit together for tea. There was just less time. Mom worked at a high school cafeteria and left early morning so I prepared breakfast for myself. When I was 17, my older sister received her Green Card in Tehran and came to stay with us permanently. She made us buy a coffee maker so she could have coffee in addition to her multiple cups of tea. After a few years of adapting myself to her Mr. Coffee machine, I got over the bitterness and coffee became my drink of choice.
It’s been years now that I drink coffee in the morning. I no longer eat jam and I hardly make tea. When I do think about a cup of tea, I dump an Earl Grey or English Breakfast teabag into the water I boiled in an electrical water boiler. In the mornings, instead of sitting around a table that smells of fresh baguette or blackberry jam, I smell the intoxicating aroma of brewed coffee from the percolator I bought specifically for New York City. While my family, including my sister, continues to boil tea and prepare it fresh at least twice a day in our house in Fairfax, Virginia, I only drink it when I have a stomachache or when I just want to wind down at the end of the night. I add a teaspoon of honey, but I never get that childhood taste back, the one that was purely sweet, freshly brewed by Mom’s hands.
While immigration can break your habits, it never eradicates sweet tastes. Sometimes, when I am alone and staring at towers and mountains of apartment buildings on East 97th street and Third Avenue, I long for sweet tea in a crystal glass. In my new studio that I share with Jill, we don’t have a kitchen. From our windows, I peak into the apartments across ours and search for their kitchens. But the only view I get is of living rooms, bedrooms, offices with bookshelves and tables. I look down at the street below, at the pedestrians, the cabs and cars that drive by and listen to the incessant and alarming sirens. And sometimes, when I am really thinking back and feeling nostalgic, I think about my very first home: our apartment in Tehran. And I long for that view from the kitchen, where I could see the snow on mountaintops. I long for my mother, who had yet to break her habits, who was still making breakfast for her children because being a mother was her only job. I walk into the Trader Joes on 14th street and look at all the different kinds of jams, the organic, the preserves, and sometimes I make the mistake of buying a jar. I go home, open it and smell nothing. I place the lid back on, push the jar at the bottom of the fridge, behind the Philadelphia cream cheese and the half and half coffee cream, and call Mom.
“Next time I come home, can you make me blackberry jam?” I ask.
“It’s not summer yet,” she says.
I hold the phone away from my mouth and cry. She continues to speak and I picture her in our kitchen in Tehran, standing in front of the window, holding a jar of blackberry jam, and the sun is casting a slight shadow over her head. And then I imagine that we never left.

New York is my second immigration. The process of assimilating to a new city, a new way of life, a faster pace, costlier living, costlier education, a new college experience (private university with a prestigious name), all of this is my second immigration. After 11 years of living in Tehran, speaking Farsi and hating elementary school, my next eleven years were in northern Virginia. Today, I have moved to New York a third time, this time to graduate in May. I have plans to stay, but because I change my mind a lot, and because circumstances change and I don’t always do what I say I will, I will refrain from the future tense.
Today, now, here I am living on Third Avenue, East 97th street. I am new to the area. I have only discovered a small, quick grocery store, a salon, a bakery and a dry cleaners. I take the 6 downtown everyday for class and in the thirty minute ride, I hover in my seat, or in a corner as I try to breathe with the increase of passengers. I like to people watch, but sometimes people watching makes me feel intimidated, like I am worthless and powerless and everyone else is trendy and fashionable and well, a New Yorker. So I don’t people watch on these occasions. I think about myself and how doubtful I am about everything I’ve done so far. I think about the money I don’t have, the money I owe to various loan companies, banks, etc, I think about my major, I think about my writing and where it’s going, where it hasn’t, I think about my friends, how few they are, I think about the friends who are not here and who would be very proud of me if they saw me doing what I do everyday and I think about my mom and dad and how blessed I am and how sorry I am to have caused them so much stress by moving to a stressful city, by my second immigration.
I am an immigrant. I am the daughter of immigrants. My family is an immigrant. What I do, how I dress, how I speak, what I eat won’t change that, won’t make it easier. But I am happy with my status. I struggle, but the struggle is worth it. And when I am feeling down and the subways and sounds and my inability to credit myself for the things I have done at my 22 years don’t come nearly to my rescue, I become more aware of what I am and why it is that life is always a struggle.
I write to cope with the reality that I am never going to be as good and as exceptional as I imagine my ancestors would want me to be. Okay, I just said because it sounded good. I write to cope with my personal disappointment with myself. Coming to New York, I thought I had to be super special, that I had to possess extra talent, extra drive and just so much more than what I came with. I thought I would have to have some kind of creative idea, some super knowledge about the world, some kind of initiative. But all I came with was a bunch of suitcases, a few good letters of recommendation and whole list of unread books. My writing was good, but far from impressionable. Though I often get the praise from professors, I don’t feel the brilliance that I used to think I may have had the potential for.
So why change my life and make things complicate, why stress and doubt all to say I am not and will never be good enough. Because I am my mother’s daughter and I like to do bigger things and I have some hope, even if small, that I am on the path to becoming…acceptable to whatever image I have demanded of myself.
As I learn more about what it takes to be living this city, the physical strength, the ability to cope with harsh criticism both from peers and writers and from everyday people on the busy streets, I learn more about what it is to be. To be is to live and to write and to continue living even if the writing goes stale. That, is the challenge. Though I may not always write because I am too busy figuring out what I am and why I am here and where I am going, I don’t stop living. If it takes me a few more phases of immigration for me to satisfy my existence, so be it.