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.