The cab driver is a man from Ghana, perhaps in his late 30s. He has a round, gentle face and dark hair. He asks if I am headed to D.C. I tell him that I am actually on my way to New York. He says, like a lot of men have said to me, that I am very pretty. Very descent, he adds. I thank him. We exchange minor information- where we are from, how long we’ve been here, 18 years for him, nine for me. He is on the phone and I hear him talking about his children; he mentions his daughter. And then I get off and he wishes me a safe trip.

Hooman drives. Laila is in the back seat, holding Darya, her baby girl. My sister is next to Laila, watching Darya. Joon, you are so cute. Mikham bokhoramet. I wanna eat you. My sister is saying to Darya, who has big cheeks, blue eyes, curled lashes, and a soft skin.
It’s just us and Darya. I pretend we are driving to darya, sea. We are singing to a Persian song, for us, for Darya, and being happy. It’s nice. This kind of happiness that doesn’t have an explanation, that doesn’t need one, that is in the moment.
I pretend we are driving to see the ocean because I like the thought of waves and water and wind. I like the thought of bliss and air and sand.
But we never get to sea. We take Darya home and put her to bed. She doesn’t sleep.

We live in the same world. We breathe from the same air, detracted from the same sand, broken into the same sky. We like perfection. We like dreaming big. We don’t believe in fairy tales, but we’ve been told we should give them a chance. We like rules, but our own. We see the world, not in black and white, but in depth, no matter the color.
I write, not to make you happy, but to make you believe. I write endlessly and in between daydreams. I write in my dreams and my nightmares. I write when I make coffee, when I take a sip, when I have a glass of white wine. I write for pleasure and pain and bitterness and sweetness and misery and happiness. I write the way you see the world. I write to be ambiguous, but to make you think. I write without thought. I write like water that overflows in the bathtub.
My mother and father could have written the past and it would have been so much easier for me to imagine feeling what they felt. My mother could have written the entire history of her pains and losses. My father could have written the entirety of his loneliness in those five years without her. He could have written what happened to him and his children without her. He could have written what it was like to live like that, tired and shaken, broken and shattered. My mother could have written her anger and her shame, her unwritten, damaged soul.
My sister does not believe in that kind of writing; she does not believe the entire world needs to feel our losses and pains. But what if we teach people through our losses and pains? What if our memories and experiences change the way people look at pain and gratitude and forgiveness? What if our written pasts make their today different in color?
My brother writes to share what happened to him. He writes the things I want all of them to write. He writes and I cry with him sometimes. I sob uncontrollably for a past I am attached to but never lived. I read and think and pause, close my eyes, and a heavy air of sadness goes through my body. I see him when I read. I see him and imagine their life and wonder what a stranger imagines.
We all write. Some of us keep it inside, under our eyelids and lashes, inside washed out pockets and hidden drawers. Some of us are afraid to tell the world about our fears and what happened to us. Some of us only move on when we tell someone else.
I like that you and I live in the same world. I like that you like how I write. I like that you admire and cherish my thoughts. I like that you read and it never becomes too much. Or maybe I like to think that’s how you think. At the end of the day, when I still haven’t heard from you, I like to remember the past and the way we used to write, simple and uncensored, how our feelings didn’t matter, or the years that separated us.
I am done writing for the night, but I see that what I wrote doesn’t matter to strangers. There is nothing to be attached to because they don’t know you and I won’t tell them.

As I sit here, under the cool fan, I feel a bitterness that I cannot quite explain. I feel that no matter how hard I try, no matter how tough I tell myself to be, I am just as attached as I were two years ago. I feel that he can fill in the emptiness I feel inside and on every blank page I struggle to write on. I feel that my anger is not towards him, but towards his lack of words.
Like him, I feel bitter about the world and our future as citizens of this flawed world. I have no faith that the next generation will prosper; we have abused all and everything that has been given to us; we have exhausted our resources, our earth, and the entire greenery. We are torn by a thunderstorm that deprives us of our wonderful, 24/7 electricity that we rely on with full dependency. We are angered when the power is gone and we are left with no Internet connection. A flicker of light frustrates us because we know nothing can be done without it.
We complain about the president we elected as a people and yet continue to show little interest towards the next election. We yell about gas prices and still go and buy that second car we always wanted.
Maybe the bitterness I feel is not just an outcome of selfishness and arrogance. Maybe the bitterness I feel has deeper roots that rise from my surroundings, my family, and ordinary strangers. Maybe I too want people to care. Maybe I too am sick of mediocrity and the ignorance of youth.
I can only write about the bitterness I feel. I can only say that I am angry for our losses in Iraq, our apathy that led to the war, our arrogance that made us believe liberty and democracy would save us in the end. What gives us this privilege to watch as the world falls apart, starves from malnutrition, and breaks by earthquakes and tsunamis? What makes us so special to expect Starbucks to satisfy our thirst and fast food to alleviate our insatiable hunger? Are we entitled to these rights because we are governed under liberty and the pursuit of happiness? Are we entitled because of the American dream that promises and urges us to buy our happiness at all costs?
I love America. I love that I am a citizen of this great land. I also believe that we are too greedy and too obsessed, too individualistic, too arrogant. Why should I, a 20 year-old who has suffered nothing and no hardship, believe that I could be a great writer? Why am I selfish enough to do anything to make myself happy? Who gave me this right? Who said that I am free to do whatever I please?
My bitterness does not end here. There is a constant battle within me; a battle I have been fighting and will continue to fight. The battle I fight involves, of course, the writer within me that despises my illusions and idealism, finds me miserable and selfish. Perhaps I have become so obsessed with my illusions of greatness that I am blinded by the little happiness that is all around me. Perhaps I am so deluded that I have lost my rationality and logic. Perhaps it is my destiny to be unfulfilled, obsessed and insatiable.
I will fight. I will not stand to see the world fall before me. I will not be miserable because the world is not great. I will not doubt my ability to better myself. I have been given a great gift and I must do all I can to give back.
As I sit, watching the dark skies fall behind me, I wonder what tomorrow will feel like. I only hope that this bitterness dissipates so that I can see the full brightness of this house that, like you said, has come out of a storybook.

Yesterday I tried to write fiction, and failed again. I am too accustomed to writing realities and I blame it on you. After two years, I still write with the same notion that the things that happen to us everyday are what make a story real.
I used to think Spain changed me as a writer. I always think different places change my writing. I don’t think I changed. I think I still write the same way. Only there are no stories now. There is my Mac notebook, a house that doesn’t quite belong to me, and my father who washes the dishes silently. I ask him to wait, to let me wash them later. I insist that he is tired from work. Just a few minutes ago, he was falling asleep on the magazine. He is just as stubborn as my mother and goes ahead and places the dishes in the washer.
The day is hot, and only getting more unbearable as the sun sets. I have had my coffee. I am not in the mood to do anything productive. I feel stale. I am savoring life, but I feel that my writing is failing me. I don’t like to use the word fail, but I’ve already done it three times.
I wonder if I have tried hard enough to be a good friend. I wonder if I have made sense. Maybe I have said too much. Maybe I am confusing. Maybe I should have…
I am angry because I feel that I am losing you. I am angry that I cannot make you see. I have talked too much about what my life is and what my needs are as a dissatisfied 20 year-old. I have had expectations. Too many of them. I am angry that you don’t talk to me. I am angry that you think before you hit send. I am angry that I am talk, and you always change your mind about disclosure. I am angry that I never know what it is you want, what it is I can give. I am angry that I don’t know my place in your life. But I am not angry enough to forget and give up and stop. I am not angry enough to stay angry. I am not angry enough to move far away. I don’t care when you will talk, but I am not giving up. I will be writing. I will be waiting. I won’t give up.
Yesterday I tried. Today, I am going to try harder. This is what you told me. This is what you said many times over. I thought my goal in life would be to change the world with writing. But I realized how unrealistic that would be. So now, I am only writing to better myself and to inspire and to feel happy. I think that if I make one person smile, then I have changed something in a very small way. I am asking you to do the same, to stop wanting to change everything that is fucked up. I am asking that you start living, without boundaries, but with joy.
I don’t want to change the world. I just want to write. I come from a family that has wanted to change a whole country. I come from a family that has had high expectations, idealistic dreams and grandeur imaginations. I am not like them. I have learned that if you live your whole life just to change the world, you forget to live for yourself, and instead you become trapped in a prison of impossible dreams.
I know what to say and I am saying it: people may not give a damn or thank everyone who helps them, but there is always someone whose life is changed along the way, and that is what makes all the difference.
I am going to think of a new story line now, and make a cup of tea, and think of realities.

Among our grievances is the inevitable fact that our father is aging, despite our refusal to accept. How do you accept that your father, who once held your hand and portrayed a figure bigger than yourself and peers, is no longer the same? How do you accept that he is no longer as strong or as passionate about the little things or even the more complicated? How do you erase your childhood memory of him raising you and replace it by the sad image you see everyday: sitting, aimlessly filling out word puzzles and dozing off to sleep in between?
But the inevitability of our father’s disappearance is not as heartbreaking as the fact that our time with him shrinks too. We miss him when he is gone at work. We miss him when he is with us because he is somewhere in his thoughts, maybe back in Paris where he studied for a year. Or maybe he is imagining the rest of his life in Europe, in the meadows, the way he has always imagined it. No one knows what the man thinks or feels. Perhaps the closest person to him is Mom but I feel that even she has lost part of him.
We are guilty for not trying hard enough. We are guilty for not talking and for assuming he has nothing to say. We are guilty for the choices we make as children. We are guilty for abandoning them to build lives of our own and satisfy our needs. We are guilty for growing up and moving on, for telling ourselves that it is all to make them proud.
I see my father everyday and everyday I feel that I am losing him too. I want to remember what he does and says for I know that I can never let him disappear before my eyes. And it is with this burden of guilt that she and I part from my father every morning and night, hoping that the next day we can make it up. We still see him as grandeur; we see him as the man who spoke out to us and stood tall. For that, it becomes ever harder to see him change.

This room is mine. We bought this house in October and I have not yet called it mine. But this room, with its light and view to the trees surrounding us, is mine. I don’t put much effort into cleaning it or organizing what it holds; I walk in and out, to sleep and pick out my clothes for the day. I always thought the wooden floor was too hard to walk on, too hard to feel, too cold to touch. But now that we are in May and the sun is out more often, the cold floor feels good to step on, to walk on in the morning after the sweltering sun has hit my face. The colors stand out, the red of my bed sheets against the cream of the floor and the walls and bookshelf.
But this room needs refreshing. It needs life, life that I am not giving. I barely stay here. I walk in and out. I spend half the day in the big room downstairs, or in the kitchen getting an apple, or making tea or a mid-afternoon coffee. And I forget about this room upstairs, forget what’s mine. The curtains and windows stay shut. And when I come back up to sleep, it’s hard to breathe.
How long does it take to accept and possess what is yours? How long does it take to move on?
Everybody else did. They came to this house with open arms, thrilled and excited as I stood aside and watched. The first day we moved into this house was the first day I saw it. And then I left three months later. They loved it from the beginning and watched its flowers bud in the spring, the snow melt and the yard become a big garden. They loved it from the beginning and called it the best thing that happened to them.
I am back now, after four months. And this room is mine.

“I don’t like this. I don’t like that things come to an end.”
“But there has to be an ending to begin something new.”
The skies are still light. It is 8:30 in Madrid and Ana and I are having our last dinner together in her kitchen. She has cut her hair and dyed it blonder. She smiles at me, her usual, the one that makes me smile wholeheartedly and without thought. She pulls her chair closer and we eat, talking with our mouths full and listening to the April winds. I tell her that I would like to start reading “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Marquez when I return home. She says that will be great practice but that it will be very difficult. Perhaps I will also read it in English, I tell her.
Four months have passed and Ana and I have talked about a lot of things in this kitchen. We’ve talked about America and fast food, about jobs and writing, about New York and my future apartment in Manhattan, about traveling the world and the beauty of Madrid, about Zapatero and Bush, about tortillas and my mother’s Iranian food. And we have always ended it with al fin, both knowing that every story, every conversation, every night, has its end.
Yet tonight I don’t hear it. Perhaps we have both realized that this is some kind of goodbye, some kind of parting and yet it isn’t. I give her, as my last parting gift, a packet of Starbucks coffee beans, and a thank you note. In Spanish I have written that I will never forget her sweet words and smile, or the taste of her morning coffee. That I will never forget everything that happened in Spain and in her sweet house. I have thanked her for everything and signed it with love. She hugs me and says I am a sweet girl and that she should have bought a book for me. So instead she lets me pick a book from the shelf in my bedroom to take it back home as a memory.
I pick Cien anos de Soledad by Marquez and have her write a dedication for me. And with that, we say good night and hasta pronto, until soon, for there are some things that don’t have an ending.

April Winds
Senora has left the windows open, and there is a gush of cool, warm summery winds coming in, surrounding the walls and rooms and the wooden floor. My roommate and I like the house in its quietness when no one is home and we are left wondering where the family has gone. April came briskly and am afraid is leaving as well. Time has a new sense now that four months are coming to an end, an end for which I never prepared for, but for which now I seem to be preparing.
The rooms are stale, but warm. I will miss that. The kitchen is old and reminds me of my grandmothers’ for it lacks modern utensils, and has a certain antiquity about it, mismatched plates and silverware, washed-out tablecloths. The living room is a displacement of colors, random décor of things collected over years and from different countries. I will also miss this natural disorder.
“There is a French girl coming in May,” Senora informs my roommate and I during dinner, “to replace Eli.” Then she says, “Of course no one will be like Eli,” looking at me.
And it is in this moment that I want to get up and hug her and say I will never forget her.
We finish dinner, watch some television and commercials in Spanish, and my roommate and I part our separate ways and go to our rooms. I sleep, though it is difficult, and think how this whole thing has been like a dream.

The skies in Madrid are darker now, more solemn, perhaps a bit tinted. The sun plays hide and seek and the winds come with more fluidity. I am spending my last days here, leaving in a month, which will happen faster than I can keep count of. I am still content with my cup of coffee, with my Senora’s beautiful smile and her sweet tongue. We have been talking more, eating dinner together, commenting on the weather, the food, the ways you can cook tortilla with or without cebolla, onion. Her mother, she says, is the only person who doesn’t like tortilla with onions because the whole world does. We talk about sangria and how too much of it can upset your stomach. She asks how I feel, how I like the classes, how I sleep. At dinner yesterday, she asked if I were thinking or if I were preoccupied with something.
And I have been thinking, about returning, about what I am returning to. I miss home. I can finally say it. But there are always these questions: what I am to do when I get back? What have I learned about the person I was and the person I am now after having lived alone for four months?
I struggle to find the right words, but I only manage to say that perhaps I have had too much to eat and need to rest a bit. She smiles and understands, then offers to let me watch some television. This morning she asked if I were feeling better and was glad to hear that I were.
These are the things I am going to miss. The way this room smells, the sound of pots and pans clinging outside of my window from the other apartments, the smell of her kitchen and the taste of every food, the morning coffee the minute after it is done, the moments after when she walks in hurriedly to the sink, then says hasta luego, see you later and closes the door behind her, the way her green eyes lit up when I tell her something unbelievable and surprising, the way she laughs after the interesting things I tell or simply for the way I say them.
“Pues, nada, al fin…”, is what my senora says after every dinner, when we have said all there was to say, when we are tired and ready for bed, and the food has settled in and it is time for us to part.