In front of me is sitting a boy of about eight. He has soft, straight blond hair. He has his arms clasped together, his eyes intense and deep, seriously contemplating something. Sometimes our eyes meet. He keeps a stern look. I do too, though internally I am smiling at him. I wonder if he thinks I’m pretty. He has a navy North Face jacket on and a pair of sneakers. The two little boys next to him are loud, playing some video game. He looks at them sternly, annoyed. He fidgets and the two little boys jump up and down in their seats, laughing. The boy watches over their shoulder, curious to see what they’re playing, but he maintains his distance and serious posture. He is a good boy.
I stand to get off at 28th street. I look at him one last time. He is looking at someone else.

I call home.
Dad picks up. His voice, quiet at first, rises, a higher pitch, a happy pitch.
“How are you Daddy?”
“Better when I hear your voice.”
He says that every time I call. My mother answers differently. She is fine or tired.
“I’m, alright. It’s going…okay.”
He knows I’m not okay.
“Oh, my darling is tired. It will be better, I promise you. If I could, I’d come visit you.”
I sometimes forget how sweet he is. When I tell Mom I’m tired, she says oh no, not again, or nothing. Then I say Mom, that’s not why I called. I called you to tell me it’s going to be okay. Well, I don’t know what you want me to say, she says. Just say what I just said! She laughs and I laugh and the next time she is about to say oh no not again, she stops mid-sentence and says, oops, I’m not supposed to say that. We both laugh again.
But funny thing is Daddy knows exactly what to say on the phone. In person, he is real quiet, so much that you get angry because you think you don’t exist.
I hold my cell away so it doesn’t touch my wet cheeks. I look at myself in the mirror as Daddy says you are going to be fine, and I look ridiculous, all crying and silly. I keep crying and I say bye Daddy, I love you. He loves me back and I feel guilty for hurting him.
“I’m sorry if I made you sad Daddy.”
He is real sweet, of course he understands.
Of course he understands.

I stand before the mirror, naked, tired, shaken. I have bags underneath my eyes. My eyes have sunken into the back of my cheekbones. My eyes are hollow. My eyes are empty and lost and forgotten. My eyes are naked.
I dip my feet into cold water that has risen slightly high in the bath tub. I turn on the hot water frantically, cursing at it, my bruised toe screaming. I am frantic and tired and shaken. The water runs down on me, hot. My back burns and I scream with joy. I am so tired and scared. I hug myself, I wrap my arms around my belly, and my belly aches with suppressed pain and confusion. I hug it. I turn and twitch and my body is wrapped in a hot blanket of rain. My eyes are wet and screaming. My knees drop. I sit on the unwashed, dirty tub, and I wrap my arms around my knees and let my eyes fall into a hole. I am thinking of my mother. I want my mother to know I am here, under, and buried. But I don’t want my mother to suffer or to hear me singing. I don’t want her here. I want her somewhere, but not here, not under.
I like to rise above sometimes and see how I walk, how I wander, how I behave in front of strangers. I like to rise above my mind and my soul and hold my head in a different position.
I like to rise above,
high,
until I am not thinking about myself.

You and I don’t have a home. We build footsteps as we go along. We fight through sandstorms. We drink red wine and pass out on the porch. We fight in our sleep, in nightmares. We don’t have a home. We build as we go along, in the hopes that one day we may find home.
Mothers taught us to think, to find our way, to get lost in sandstorms and build homes. Fathers taught us to work hard, to keep building dreams. We fought with them. We fought with ourselves. We kept trying, but we never found home.
We are always running, you and I. We run from the cloud of undeniable guilt, we run from absolution. We are afraid of permanence. We like to dress ourselves in silly costumes and never wear the same thing twice.
Do you find home, ever?
I sing. I dance. I write. I fly in my head, sometimes in my dreams, and I never land because landing would mean permanence. I can’t land. I have to fly and I have to keep falling until I find home. Home is everywhere. Home is the little house on Cedar. Home is the brown blocked building Mom and Dad bought years ago and then sold. Home is senora’s casa on calle Hernani and the sunlight melting behind the balcony. Home is the building where the young kids throw parties and get drunk and do wild things.
I won’t search anymore. I am done searching. I will build as I go along. Don’t judge me. Don’t tell me I am wasting my life. No fight is a waste. No thought, no nostalgic remembrance is a waste. If I decide to get drunk and forget it all, let me. Don’t tell me home is here. Home is nowhere. I will never find it, and that is okay.
Let me run. Let me run. Let me fall. Let me fall.
I don’t ever want to hide or find home or cry on Mommy’s fragile shoulders because she’s fought too hard. This is my fight, not hers. This is my search, not hers. Home is a mush of memories, a puddle of past rainbows and unforgotten sand castles. Remember the sand castles we used to build. We were children. We thought everything was so pretty and so darn colorful. It still is. Every damn sight is pretty and colorful, but nothing is home. Don’t ask me if I am going home. I will build on, come and go, I will never be permanent. I will never be gone.
I will always be running with scissors, cutting up pieces and shredding diaries. And you will never catch me.

I had a dream about my brother. Then I woke up and my eyes were teary. From the crack of the window, I smelled rain and spring. I made coffee and toast and called my mother. I had nothing to say. She didn’t either.
This city is so deceiving sometimes, so seductive, so mysterious. I am myself and yet not. I am dazzled by its every element, and yet intimidated.
And I soon will leave. I have to move out, though I am surly coming back. Am I not?
Yes. I am coming back.

I miss my father.
He is even more absent than before. He sits behind the kitchen counter, head bent, a word puzzle before him. He says nothing. He closes his eyes sometimes and I smooth his gray hair.
“Don’t you want to talk Daddy?”
“My mouth will hurt,” he says.
First I assume he is joking. He often cracks jokes; it’s the way he communicates to his daughter. But, this time he doesn’t smile. He doesn’t even look up. And I feel pathetic. I’ve left and he doesn’t want me back.

My mother lost her voice today. I call her everyday from my cell phone. Sometimes in between classes. Sometimes on my way to the subway, or in between sips of coffee, or on the sidewalk where I stand in one corner and get hit by walkers. I call everyday. To reassure us both we are okay and because she is more positive on the other end of the line than when we converse face-to-face. Maybe because I am so far away she knows I need her positive energy.
But today I don’t recognize her muffled, hushed, screwed-up voice; it sounds old and bizarre and broken. I want to cry. I hang up. I tell her we will talk when she is better.
I can’t help it though. I call again later in the evening at Starbucks. I am tired and want to cry and she sounds the same. It’s almost frightening.
“Are you sick? Did you go to the doctor?”
No. She says.
I can’t do it. We say good bye. I sink deeper into the foreign couch, put my coffee aside and think of that eerie, unfamiliar voice.

Baba slowly opens my bedroom door and I hear the sound of the knob turning. He calls out my name in a hushed whisper and says bidar mishi azizam? Will you wake up dear? I struggle to get out of bed, but I tell him, in my muffled morning voice that I will. Minutes later, we are in the car together. He has already turned the engine on and turned up the heater. As I drive him to the metro station he says, khoobi jigaram? Are you all right my love? I smile as I watch the road and nod my head because I am too sleepy to answer.
Then I begin to remember the days when he would wake me up for school and prepare breakfast or how he once burned my toy blanket as he ironed my scarf. I remember how he held my hands as we walked to school and how I thought they were too big. How I thought he would always be tall and strong.
Before he heads out into the cold December wind, he kisses my right cheek and thanks me. I watch him walk away and my throat burns and I can no longer look.
As I drive back home, I wonder how many more times I will watch him walk away.

Smoke fills the room in a mist of little, hollow circles. I cough; I am not a good smoker. But smoking hookah is a little different; you have more time to inhale and you can exhale all of it out if you do it the right way. I know no one here; though I have been introduced briefly by name. I listen to their conversations, nod and pretend I exist. I pretend that I am not consumed by the mist that makes everything seem unreal.
I listen and I watch.
When people smoke, it is as if they are revealing something sacred about themselves, something a stranger shouldn’t know about. You look at them and you feel like they are vulnerable, like they will tell you anything, answer any question. Yet they are so lost, so far away, so distant that you find yourself in the same position: distant and unreachable.
I give up as I begin to feel slightly dizzy and watch as someone puffs a perfect loop. The hookah pipe is wrapped around her leg, underneath her boot as she leans back, breathing in and out gusts of smoke. She is 18. The coal continues to burn, the cinder still glowing in the dark. Raindrops begin falling on the ceiling, hard and loud, like ice. You can see the droplets as they cluster in a corner on the hard glass. And if you listen long enough and block out the chatter, the laughter and the sound of coal burning, you can hear the pounding in one long beat.
I forget the names I was introduced to a few minutes ago and I am sure they have forgotten mine. We are probably never going to meet again.
This is a way of passing time, of meeting new people without getting to know them, of talking without really listening or listening without ever talking. It’s a way of smoking through a filtered pipe instead of a socially unacceptable cigarette that you throw out and crush under the sole of your shoe. It’s saying hello and goodbye at the same time to someone you met a day ago.
And sometimes, it’s you believing you are part of a bigger world when you are really just another writer who’s trying to figure things out.

The train moves, steadily, calmly, as if no one is driving, as if taking a walk by the shore on feet. No. It doesn’t feel as if we are moving. The windows are white, but unclear, halfway covered by the seat in front of me. There is a strange smell of staleness that reminds me of antiquity and buried childhood memories. The kind of memories that you must stretch your mind for to remember, feel and touch.
And now, sitting next to a stranger and alone, I think about time, the space between that life and this. That, which was simpler and chosen. This, which is based on decisions, choices, desires and selfishness.
We pass many sights. The trees begin to shift. The lights change; the colors become light. Soon there are trails, empty ones and hollow ones. I watch, drifting between sleep and dreams. I love moving, traveling and falling out of place because I become aware of my senses. I become aware of what I do and what I see and how I react to new things and new people. I like to think of things I don’t have time to think of when I’m in class and restless. I begin to wander, and I do it with a sense of confidence that I only get when I’m alone and a traveler.
None of us has the same destination and yet we are on one journey. In a way, we are together, related through the same track, the same silence that echoes in our ears as we imagine time passing. If we didn’t imagine time moving, we wouldn’t survive. There’d be nothing to hold on to in the future, nothing to dream of, nothing to ponder on. It is this thought, this image of time and of ourselves that makes us travel, keeps us moving along the tracks, keeps us watching the skies change behind shadowed windows and dark trees.
We move farther and farther from the starting point. But there is always the notion of return, the safe and comforting notion that what we leave behind will still remain when we return. That whatever we don’t find in that new time we can go back and recover from the old. It is this return that keeps us safe, eager to taste someone else’s cooking, sleep in someone else’s bed, sit in someone else’s car. It is this return that binds us to the past, to what will always be and unchanged because it is our soul that changes. It is our mind that changes, not the inanimate objects of our past.
The train moves, steadily, calmly and the stranger next to me asks where I am headed to.