April 1998

Iran instilled her poetry in me and sent me away.
My math teacher approached my desk in class. I slammed shut my diary. "I caught you," he said playfully. 'I always get caught,' I retorted soberly.
I no longer glorify people.
Thunder!
Friends picked me up and we took a tortuous road to Stinson Beach where we picnicked in the wind. I could taste the salt on my lips. The waves impressed us. We ate cheese and fruit, then smoked a joint. It was a beautiful day. The sun made me forget that I once lived under an umbrella.
My relationship with Anna deepens. She is tall, has dreamy green eyes, long blond hair, which she often wears in a braid or pigtails. She has long lanky arms, long beautiful legs. She is such a hippy. After work we go to her apartment where we smoke a joint on the balcony and unwind in the sun. She tells me crazy stories from her past, her family, moving to Marin as a teen, and her friends now. She is hospitable and provides me with fresh towels, something to drink, fruit, a book, and classical music. I shower first. I change and lie on her white down comforter. While Anna showers I drift in and out. Then she joins me and we lie side by side and read in silence. Friends.
Tired again from living and reliving. Am I crazy when I analyze my relationships, daydreams, and people? Or am I crazy if I don't? Isn't life easier lived in a rut? Isn't digging oneself out more of a chore, a superfluous challenge when life is hard enough? Isn't it neurotic to dangle from every phrase as if my life depended on these words? Isn't it unrealistic? Every perilous viewpoint of the self…
Giving up sex entirely would be like an alcoholic giving up driving rather than sobering up! I have to allow myself what is natural, inevitable.
Keeping it honest. Keeping it together.
I did not love Luis. I know this and admitting it is painful. Around the time I was "seeing" Luis I had a repetitive thought: that if I contracted HIV from a person I loved, from a relationship rather than a one-night stand, I would not be as emotionally destroyed or as shameful. So, out of fear and shame I convinced myself that my love for Luis was real, that it was deeper than anything I had ever felt for another person. Love became my lie when love should never be anything less than… love. God, I hate to seem so fickle, so mercurial. But this is how it is.
It is a privilege to travel by memory.
Evening. Such a sad and beautiful twilight. I'm in the eye of it, caught as if a thief. This sorrow is so familiar, so habitual. Too many resolutions, too much finger pointing… in the mirror. Meditating too much on all that I can't and don't have. I sit in the garden of silent resentments, under the apple tree, and listen to the neighbor's trees rustle. I think of the relationships in which we hurt each other without intending to, without knowing how not to… I'm sorry when I said things to hurt you… It was out of hypersensitivity and helplessness. I was merely mismanaging emotions.
Gardens as fragile as this paper, this mood from which I reach you.
It's the same old story: routine bores the heck out of me and I want to drop everything and start a new life because in beginnings I discover enthusiasm and sustenance. Everything's well. Why this feeling of doom? Of failure. That I am nothing but a disappointment. Still, that's no tragedy and surely I can recover.
What saves me today? Is it the taste of backyard grown lemons on my fingertips and in my ice water? Is it the music? Felicity. Today I don't fear. I am tranquil and comfortable.
Aside from my occasional and social falsities I am wholeheartedly a good person. I really am!
But why do we continue to peak into the future? Why do we always doubt ourselves? Do we not believe in our talents, in our self? Why can't we just trust?
Why do marriages lose their mysticism?
Why do our voices grow mordant, distant?
The way a woman turns her face to look out the window reminds me of Luis. He survives in the angles of others' faces.
Always this need to atone for my weaknesses, to test my limits, to challenge my strength with fasts of sorts. Denying myself freedom. Assigning myself rules, truths, noble convictions. Am I on the path to improvement or self-sabotage? Always trying to find out if I am a hero or a coward? Wondering all the while if I'll ever overcome these strangely defeating patterns, habits, and addictions. I have this overwhelming need for a struggle, for these tapes in my ear, this constant comparison to others- I don't want to become like that, like him, like her…
I wake up to my five o'clock alarm.
I realize that writing- writing anything- requires faith, not talent.
Now wine. Sips of sentimentality, sensuality. Lives I have lived. Loneliness. I'm as lonely as I am happy. Always something missing. A friend. A mother. A lover with whom I am not weak but at my best. He only exists in flashes. I can trust him. But who will he be? Lover, do not be eccentric, volatile, moody. Be secure. Sure. Consistent. Because I won't be. Secure. Sure. Consistent. But I'll always be true, faithful, fruitful. Lover, be subtle, couth, sensitive.
San Francisco calls me while I am smoking in the yard, in the dream. The night air is cool, has a texture of its own, a texture that belongs only to the Bay. A breeze flows by and through as I sip wine and smoke. Dream. The breeze reminds me that there are still many fantastic destinations, possibilities. I watch the breeze pull away from the yard like a train, slumbering trees and shrubs disturbed by its gentle departure. Scents are roused, sensations, possibilities, opportunities, visions, reveries. I think of San Francisco, which is only minutes away from here. I could touch it if I tried. Pull it to me and hold it against my heart and move with its reverberations, vibrations, its constant trembling. I want to be there as a visitor, a stranger, a welcomed guest amidst the lights, traffic of men, of music. Strangely I don't want to be a native. I know I'll never belong to San Francisco, as I never did to Modesto, Chicago, even Iran. Forever foreigner. I am comfortable as a foreigner now, comfortable being the stranger, comfortable longing for the final acclamation that never comes. For me marriage to land is impossible. Is it because I am Assyrian and have no country of my own? Is it that I am queer? I live in anticipation, in longings, for the impossible. But tonight, buzzed from the wine, standing in the night, in the yard, I crave overstimulation. I want to walk upon city sidewalks where a stranger might turn out to be brother, sister, lover. I want to converse with other transients. I love that which passes, does not stay. Drunk moments. People. Glances in windows and mirrors, in someone else's eyes just to confirm that I am real, that the ethereal emotions and longings have not kidnapped me entirely from the material scene itself. I want to know for certain that I am here. I do exist. I want to be reminded that I did not die laughing in Chicago, with handsome men, drinking with Brandon, going places, and that the pain I felt was necessary. It gave me pleasure because it was intense when everything else was so hopeless, boring. The pain made my life odd and romantic. I felt it and I felt alive. I want to go into the city tonight and feel myself disengaging from that pain, falling away from the fetters of my past, to prove to myself that I can move on, and that I have. I want to arrive here fully, whole. I want to exit the past, its intoxicating allure, and trip into now, the streets here, into water, light, sound, wine, laughter, further exchanges, movement. My heart is pounding as I write, my body responds to this deep wishing well for life and new experiences. I write between blue walls that never could contain me.
How can I sleep now when I am levitating ten thousand feet above my bed?
Friends and strangers alike have always been tender with me, open with me. Maybe they know I won't betray them, that their secrets are safe with me. I won't torture them, blackmail them. I reassure them, make poetry out of their misfortunes right before their eyes. Tonight I must bond with others no matter how painful the reality that I cannot penetrate their armor, and they mine. I want to touch, to influence with hope and generosity. Stirred, agitated by desire to see my friends, be with them, love them. Desperate to make ties last.
Alone at the San Rafael bus terminal I think of a name that strikes me as uniquely breathtaking: Luay. Then a man recently released from prison plays me a Blind Faith song on his guitar because I am wearing a Blind Faith Café t-shirt. I set aside Anais Nin and listen to the shirtless man whose overly tanned skin looks dry and aged. He wears only a pair of funny looking checkered trousers. When my bus arrives and I give him cigarettes he takes them, pulls out a piece of paper and scribbles something on it, hands it to me. On the bus I open the folded paper. It is a photocopy of one of his sketches. "To Emil- he has spelled my name correctly!- All the best to the best…"