Dear seekers of the true things,
It’s been a while. Three months to be exact. I would say it’s been an exhausting and interesting time away from these pages but I banned the word interesting from my class. These past months, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about what matters and a lot of cleaning up after people who really don’t. Basically, the usual.
Someone who does matter is my mother who very recently asked: Why haven’t you written anything? I’ve written a lot of things, I retorted (what is it about sitting in the backseat as your parents drive that shoves you back to your worst teenage years?!) No, I mean you haven’t written anything I have read, she responded unfazed.
Today as I was doing other stuff, I came across short pieces I wrote almost 10 years ago when I was fiddling with a book I wanted to call…These are the True Things (what else would I call it?) These pieces centered on memories of my childhood and teenage years in Iran, and looking back, were steeped in a sense of loss. I know why but it doesn’t matter today.
Below is one such piece. It’s a bit of a departure but I offer it to you as a placeholder for now and so my mom has something of mine to read. As alway, thank you and I’ll be seeing you here soon!
The Threshold
Everybody expected him to come any moment, yet when he did the sound of the doorbell, bouncing as it did through the now-empty living room, startled us all. My mother looked at me wordlessly then got up from the floor where I was packing a suitcase and opened the door without bothering to look through the peephole. There he was, standing at the threshold, as he had most Fridays for the past year.
He was sixteen like me, with light brown floppy hair that brushed across his forehead, dressed in a checkered button-down shirt tucked neatly into his khakis, and holding a book in his right hand. I smelled him before I saw him, engulfed as he was in the cologne of a much older man. When he saw me, his eyes lit up for a second before settling into a darkness that mirrored the face I always made when I would see him at the door most Fridays: One of annoyance at his attentions, a sense of obligation to receive his attentions, and a sprinkle of pleasure at being the object of them. “Salam,” I said, coupling my hello with a purposefully forced smile that scotch-taped itself across my face. “Salam, sorry for the bother,” he responded, as he had for the past year. “It’s no bother,” I said grinning, “we’re leaving next week.” He lowered his head and I thought I could see him swallowing his tears.
Fridays were holy days. It was the day of rest, of no school, of waking up then lying in bed and staring at the ceiling. Of avoiding homework and secretly reading novels my mother had deemed too mature for me. They were days of skipping out on chores with the excuse that I had too much homework. Of blithely walking into the living room and just standing there as my father would listen to the Friday prayer sermons on his radio hoping to glean a speck of information from the sandstorm of propaganda, as my mother tried to feed my baby sister, and as my young brother threw Legos at unseen enemy combatants from behind the couch. Of having lunch as a family followed by watching the weekly movie shown on state television. Of the familiar panic that would set in by late afternoon from the knowledge that the day was ending and I hadn’t even begun to do my homework for the next day.
But Fridays were also days of love, when a boy who looked and smelled like a man would come to the door, stand patiently in the hallway, and for hours—sometimes two, sometimes three—ask for nothing more than to hear my thoughts on books, music, and life. He would never come in, no matter who—my father, my mother—begged him to. He would never leave early, no matter who—my grandmother, my uncles—had come for an afternoon visit. He just stood there, at the door, as if by being the last man standing, he’d finally get the girl or at least a look, if not of love, then of acceptance. My father once, half as a joke, half as an act of mercy, had brought him a chair and placed it right at the door frame two legs inside the house and two outside. Sit! My dad had implored him. But the boy just put his hand on his heart and politely thanked my dad. When he had not budged half an hour later (just shuffling his feet to get the blood circulating), my father had taken the chair, crossed the threshold, and placed it in the hallway, its legs neatly aligned with the doorstop. Two hours passed before I carried the unused chair back into the living room.
He had come in once. Just once. It was not on a Friday and my parents had not been home. When I saw the crown of his head through the peephole, I toyed with the idea of quietly walking backwards in the hopes that he hadn’t have seen the shadow of my eye slide across the peephole. But instead I opened the door: “Come in,” I said, “my parents aren’t home and if you stand by the door, the neighbors will talk.” He came in and stood in the foyer, next to our coat rack, and bent his waist forward to peek into the living room. “What are you listening to?” “A tape,” I said allowing my irritation with his presence to seep through every letter of navar. He just stared at me and in those few seconds I could see the excitement with which he had dressed at home, dabbed on his father’s cologne, and walked over to our house hoping that this time, for a change, I’d give him more than firmly punctuated sentences. My cruel teenage heart briefly melted.
“Before we left America to come here, my father taped music from the radio and television. I guess he already knew this kind of music would be banned here.” I shrugged hoping my voice wouldn’t give away how valuable these eighteen tapes were to me. “This is tape number three. It’s a tv show, hosted by a guy named Tony who gives awards to musical plays.” The sun’ll come out, tomorrow… poor orphan Annie sang. I loved her. “Do you have the new Madonna album?” he asked, emboldened by the softness Annie had brought to my face. His question hardened the air. I turned my back to him and walked to the tape player, acting as if I hadn’t heard his question. I pressed stop, and for added emphasis, pressed eject, and took tape #3 out and placed it on the dining table. “Yes.” I replied curtly and waited for him to leave.
But on this Friday, seconds after he rang the doorbell, I had vowed things would be different; that I would be different. For this was the last Friday before my family immigrated to America and never came back. It was the Friday when the furniture had been sold and the house was littered with open suitcases and unpacked clothes. It was the Friday I had decided that I would speak to him in long sentences that ran on about how excited I was to leave and how sad I was to leave behind all that I had known in my life. I was going to talk to him in a way he had silently begged me to do for all these months, and I was going to give him tapes number 1 through 18 to thank him for a love I had never wanted and could never return. But before I could say anything or even reach for the tapes I’d neatly lined up on the bench in the foyer, he stepped forward, one foot across the threshold; I instinctively jumped back. His eyes were red and glistening; his right hand reached forward and dropped the book on the bench. “I just wanted to give you this,” he mumbled, and ran down the stairs.
I felt my cheeks burn with shame and anger as I forcefully slammed the door behind him, hoping he’d hear my fury. Last time I try to be nice to someone, I thought to myself, as I picked up the book and without even looking at it, thoughtlessly dropped it on a pile of clothes my mother had neatly arranged in a suitcase.
Years went by. In a different country and a different house we now called home my mother was in the kitchen preparing lunch, my father was half listening to some Iranian diaspora program on television, my teenage brother was on the phone with his girlfriend, and my sister was listening to Kurt Cobain as she taped a Nirvana poster on her bedroom wall. What else should I be? All apologies. It was a holy Sunday afternoon in Los Angeles.
I walked into my parents’ bedroom and stared at the bookshelves, half reading the titles, half wondering if the boy I desperately loved in college and who did not love me back would ever call. I ran my fingers on the spines of the books, playing an arpeggio on them from left to right, from shelf to shelf, until a brown colored spine caught my attention. It looked both familiar and out of place. I placed my index finger on the top of the book, tipped it towards me, and peeked at the cover. It was a book in Persian, with a brown and cream checkered cover that framed an abstract painting in the middle. “How do I know this book?”
By now, the book was in my hands, opened to the first page. There in black ink, in hesitant handwriting was a note to me: “Read me, line by line, and not from the end as you normally do. Yours, B.” I quickly flipped the book to its last page and saw that the boy who looked and smelled like a man, knowing of my love for reading the ending of a book before I read the beginning, had taped a strip of paper over the book’s last sentence. Excitement made my fingers clumsy as I repeatedly flicked the corner of the tape to peel it off. Finally, the tape gave, and I pulled it off the paper from right to left. The book’s cheap ink and years of neglect had rubbed against the strip of paper he had taped to the book, and all of it, all that I desperately needed to know before I could even begin, had turned into grey smudges that blended into the yellowing paper.