August 1997

A city pigeon is bolder than a poem. A poem is nervous, easily frightened, startled into flight from one's lips by the pen. I find that in writing a poem I have to approach it with caution, gingerly, or altogether feign indifference. A poem is not accustomed to handouts, and is timid, wild. Elusive.

Wishes keep upstaging each other.
When will I cease comparing myself?
My grandmother calls me into the cool yard for tea.

If I were to have children would I give them these pages, these notebooks? All my fantasies, failures, haste, hope, and misinterpretations… a gesture of love and trust…

In fleeing my father's poison I ran into my own. This escape led me to cafes, theaters, books, the romance of language, and unfortunately to my own addictions. Intellectually I became truant, psychologically vagabond, spiritually gypsy. I only hope that those years alone weren't instrumental in establishing who I am, and my character. I'd like to believe that through honesty with the self and by remaining forever pliable I may continue to grow, learn, change, and improve. I will not allow misfortune to define me indefinitely. Nor will I allow success to hinder me, retire me, render me motionless. Not even death will be my anchor.
Maybe I'll never win the Pulitzer, maybe I'll never be anything more than who I am now, but I resolve to live my life with the utmost measure of respect for myself and others. I shall be artistically fulfilled even if in the privacy of my own room, my own heart, and my own diary, in the dusty folds of these pages. I may teach, I may deliver post, I may wait on tables, or be a gas station attendant, but throughout life I will adhere to the fantastic music of my imagination, love of words, love of cities, love of people, romance, the moment, art, memory, family, friends, community.

Vestigial dreams of Chicago in which I am the hero in pursuit of a faceless villain… I am virile and handsome, agile. I am running for a long time when I happen upon a circle of African-American women sitting on the curbside, conversing, laughing. I need rest and they are welcoming, friendly. I lie in a puddle of water and stretch out. We introduce ourselves. Behind the women I notice a tidy row of little dollhouses and am pleased by this pleasant sight.
Katherine Hepburn was just on PBS narrating her own story, and how I admire her. It is proved again that a self-assured child is a product of well-rounded parents. Good parenting almost always ensures a successful, confident child. Hepburn's parents read plays to her when she was a small child.
Watching this I am reminded of my love for women. Men don't fascinate or interest me as much. My favorite writers and singers are invariably women. What allows me to revere her so much more than I do men? Is it that I am homosexual? Is it that I do not want to fuck her, enslave her emotionally and erotically? Is it sexual indifference that permits me to see her as equal, with respect, and lucidly?
I want to pause for water but I know that if I stop now the momentum and mist of writing will blow away and reveal loneliness, boredom, when I don't want to return to society, to civilization, to people and their baseness. To the news, the market, the street, highways, and bridges.

On campus desire came to me in the form of a beautiful swarthy boy whose dark, dark eyes locked onto mine for an instant and eternity. And these small doses of lust are all I need. My focus is on other things, deeper things. Not desire- fugitive and volatile. I feel I must go against my instinct and become like those around me- human, logical, practical, reasonable, and do the appropriate thing. I'm told this is all for my own good.

My grandmother says reflectively in Assyrian, "Death is a thief."
I say you can make an entire salad out of Madonna; she can be tomato, cucumber, lettuce, onion!

I am sipping Turkish coffee alone in the yard, in the cool Bay Area breeze that's always on the brink of becoming a volatile oceanic gale. But when thoughts are warm, when tender reflections prevail, I feel I could endure any storm, even the arctic! I watch birds play, chasing each other through the air, through the trees and bushes, darting, and think: I am a bird that hasn't yet found his perch, always in flight, collecting impressions, living through rootless reactions, traversing memories so real I burn with hope that I may learn to share them through the overwhelming art of words. With the world.
I thrive on solitude, on summoning the tenderness of retrospection- a vista from which I may look back and see nothing but laughter, love, friendship that's lasting and does not give into grudges and resentment. When I am in harmony with my memories and experiences my mind is so lifted from the earth that I am able to see the people in my life with heightened senses, which cannot perceive their faults, their shortcomings, or my own disenchantment with them.
I am coming to terms with my sensitivity for which others have always put me down, specifically my mother whose definition of an Assyrian son is something diametrically different than what I have become. My emotional and sexual proclivities are the very skeletal structure that holds me up, makes me erect, able to move no matter how awkwardly through the days. This is my blessing, not my downfall. I am not willing to struggle against it anymore. It is mine.
Why continue to stand with my back against the wall and watch other less talented, less passionate characters trample by? For whom am I censoring my song? When will I stop protecting the bigot in my head and begin to live fully, freely?

I discard the complaints and the disappointments and hold on to the romance in life, the pleasant chapters. I look forward.
Once in Minneapolis while visiting Marcelo I met an earthy young woman at a café who also kept a journal and wrote poetry. We talked about the joy of writing, its therapeutic benefits, as well as the heartaches, challenges, and disappointments of writing. Nearby a young man sat listening to our conversation, but kept quiet. I was polite and included him in our interchange by asking him if he kept a diary. He said no, that he found it egotistical and self-absorbed. I didn't know what to say just then and found no reason to challenge or to argue the point. Thinking about his remark today I suppose some of any art is egotistical and self-absorbed, but is there anything wrong with this? Can't an artist be those things and selfless and giving? For me, more often than not, keeping this diary is the most humbling task, and is more a record of my grammatical, psychological, emotional, and intellectual errors and ignorance than a tally of self-worship!
Sometimes I'm certain there is no such thing as "past", that this fantasy called "past" is an old wives' tale. There is only now, here, us.

Now Lawrence, one of two male residents here at Casa De Maria, is confused again. He stands naked in the doorframe of his bedroom and looks at mom questioningly. It's only early afternoon but Lawrence has no sense of what it is he is supposed to be doing. Go to bed? Watch TV? Sit at the dining room table? It breaks my heart. It truly does.
The weather in Marin can be as arbitrary as the ocean itself. One minute calm, the next discordant. The sky over Novato is as temperamental as a poet. The clouds his words with which he expresses his numerous moods- now light, now dark, now still, now nomadic, traveling madly.

I've begun reading Volume III of "The Early Diary of Anais Nin". I want to share a passage from the book with you- some delicious words that I wish I had read in my youth when I couldn't quite capture the intensity with which I felt life move inside and around me.
"So much reading confuses me. It makes me wonder what it is I want to write, and how. It makes me think intensely, about everything, and it gives me a fever that day by day burns more violently. It is the fever of life, the consuming desire to live intensely, to create something strong and great, to understand all things, to possess every knowledge and every experience, to do and to be giant. I want to be everywhere at once. I want to read more, to see more people, to be more alone with nature, to write more…"
Each day I am committing a little more of my spirit and soul to this art… living!
Having been in the States as long as I have, and as I grow more into my new skin I come to understand that I am neither entirely Assyrian, nor American. I am the bird that migrates from one sentiment to the next without a name or one color. I collect along the way songs I may hear in the sky. Learning. Adapting. Perhaps I am a mockingbird.
This is a diary of hope, not to be spoiled by disheartening realities, trivial things.
Just as a lone leaf in a faraway rainforest welcomes its nourishment from the rain and discards excess water by way of a gutter-like center vein, so too shall I gather my sustenance from hardship, discarding excess pain. I learn from the leaves…

For my twenty-fourth birthday mom and I went for hamburgers, and the afternoon went quite smoothly. I told mom that the best thing that came out of her marriage to dad was me! She guffawed and looked at me adoringly. I felt most loved at that very moment. Afterward we went for a stroll. We were, today, the way I dream of being always- comfortable, relaxed, and just purely at ease with each other, ourselves, and the world around us. Today, for the first time mother affectionately called me an artist, not disdainfully.
And now I have to go- go laugh, go drink, go look into faces and search for humor and hope, go be American, go tell secrets and listen to others' confessions, go live among others until it is all over and I can sneak home and stop pretending to be twenty-four, and become again my actual age- two!

'He used to drink and was not a pleasant drunk. Some people I like better drunk but dad was never one of them. He was a closet drinker though we all knew he was doing it. He didn't drink for leisure, but snuck swigs from the bottle behind closed doors. It made him a coward in my eyes. His actions conveyed dual meanings. My brother and I loved him and we hated him. It was all a big mess…'
"I didn't even know you had a brother."
'Sometimes it feels like I don't. He's managed to grow marginal, almost absent. We are diametrically different people. We got along well on my last visit to Chicago I think because I was a guest and had nothing to defend from his indifference and his indolence.'

I achieve steadiness when I have implemented the power of beauty, acknowledged the authority of truth, and felt the omnipotence of emotion.
Yesterday mom was shocked to discover I have kept a diary since the age of sixteen- an assiduous account of the events in our lives. She seemed wholly against the documentation of any incriminating material.
"What did you write about me?" she demanded. "Did you write bad things about me?" Now she sounded troubled.
'Are you a bad person?'
She was silent for a moment.
"You've kept them all?"
I said that I have.
She said she didn't feel comfortable with people knowing her business. I asked how realistic she thought it was that my diary would be read by others.
'Even if it does get published no Assyrian would read it,' I assured her.
She was not appeased and said, "If they find out the author is Assyrian they will read it."
When I reminded her that we would have to go back to Modesto to see the production of "Third Rail" she grew restless again, suspicious, and coldly asked, "What is this play about?"
She said she did not want to be surprised or embarrassed by a sensitive plot. I was disheartened that my own mother suspects I have written something provocative or disturbing, and that she feels she has to question me, instead of encouraging and supporting me.
'Don't worry, the play's about a man and a woman,' I said humorlessly. Then added, 'It's about life and the human spirit.'
I suppose my mother may still have the power to censor me in real life, deny me acceptance of my sexual and emotional proclivities, but I know that within the page she cannot control my creative candor.

Anais Nin has spoken for me. I have found my home in the pages of her diary. I try to hit the same notes. Strange that I could relate so much to a woman who is deceased.
One night in Chicago, a long time ago, Tom said to me, "You don't have to like everyone, Emil." I remember I was deeply offended. I thought it a worthy characteristic to try and like every single human being I met, not a handicap. To attempt peace, reconciliation, understanding. All this because I wanted the same for myself. I wanted to be accepted, assured that others tried just as hard to love and accept me. I did not want to believe the world could be indifferent.
Today I find it more productive to allow people their faults, leaving them be. At least this way I can perhaps move through them somewhat unscathed. I have to try to understand that the hostility in the world, in the air is not necessarily geared toward me, that some things indeed have nothing at all to do with me! That my mother's and father's inabilities to overcome their own grief, pain, intolerance, and judgments do not fetter me to misery. I can love them without suffering for and with them…
Something's missing today. Some magic, some energy and enthusiasm. Some quality of wholeness, completion. But at least I am warm from red wine.

Had a dream in which I had sex with Lee on the farm. It was a most erotic dream.
In another dream I removed an unwelcome character from my mother's house; he had taken advantage of her generosity and timidity. I wonder if in life itself I will ever be my mother's savior, her hero.
I also dreamt of a plump, healthy, and happy baby boy.

Visiting friends in Modesto for a weekend. I resolve for the millionth time to refrain from following my habits to darker places. It's so unproductive to drink and be silly. Stupid! I want to return to solitude, to arduous writing, concentration, silence, discipline.
A pandemonium of the senses. Too much motion, too many people. I hope that Novato offers stability, ideal conditions for erudition, creativity, focus. A part of me is in agony while another revels in ecstasy. I feel complete in times of imbalance. It's four in the morning and I cannot tear myself away. I want to write it all out, out of my system, my emotional and neurotic conduits. Who needs sleep? Isn't it better to live, read, or better yet make love, kiss and tumble? I want love and freedom. I want creativity and husband. Nothing more.
Noon. The other afternoon mother was watching a soap opera while I lay with my head in her lap. She played with my hair, ran her fingers through the curls. She wished out loud that she had my hair, and counted my many incipient grays. We laughed in the tenderness.
We are going back to Novato this afternoon, to a new life. I wish to leave behind my weaknesses and these social and inexorable temptations. I want health. I want strength. I don't want to drink frivolously, waste my romantic tendencies on intoxicated and disastrous profundity. I don't want to smoke cigarettes or pot. I don't want to waste a single hour engaged in meaningless, pointless, uninspiring conversation. This time, in making new friends in Marin I will be selective, discriminate. From the new friend I will expect intelligence, manners, abundant compassion and sensitivity. The new friend will not smoke, will not do drugs, will not deteriorate willingly. From the new friend I will learn balance. I will not accept every invitation and will refuse those who fail my stringent qualifications. I will work and study while my rules and efforts culminate in creative productivity. No more base frivolity. This is the mother-resolution of them all! But what about my old friends? Will I merely dump them? Abandon them?
Friends have just dropped me off in Novato and left. I feel abandoned. Kelly pointed out the greenery and beauty here. She was almost alarmed by the number of trees and hills. We sat in the backyard and drank Coke. Kelly looked about and approved of the charm, the calm, and the enchanted feel of the garden. She paused and said, "I feel like you're our pet and we're passing you on to new owners in your new home!" We burst out laughing, which for a moment made us forget that soon we'd be parting.
Now alone I come to learn that the realization of every dream is demanding. Nothing is easy. All is hard work, constant work…

It may seem to others in the household that I am merely eating feta cheese and lavash, drinking hot tea, writing, but inside I battle indomitable doubts concerning living and my identity, my role in this family, in this wide world. There is a duality to each act, a lower level, an underworld of nameless emotions that accompany every move and gesture, all the words I speak- Assyrian or English. I rely too much on sentience that often I am bombarded by envy for those who seem to be living by action alone, indifference, immune to deep emotion. Rather, I assume they are immune because I am not in their shoes, in their mind. I imagine this is why alcohol and pot do not work for me; I am already involved enough- the intoxication only overaccentuates the doubts, the fears, even the joys. I do not need further exaggerations!
At the moment I am not the intrepid, enthusiastic, heroic young man I expect myself to be. I am slow, moody, and uninspired. This bothers me a great deal. Hope to get over it soon.
This is my "I-can't" day. On days when I lose faith and confidence, and joy leaves my body I become resentful and irritable. On days like these I am nothing. I am not a lover, a good son, a writer. I am critical and unforgiving- of others and myself. Everything is a lie. A day of deterioration.
And when I am sitting in the yard where it is cool I wish desperately that I could imitate this coolness of the wind, this ability of the wind to remain light, invisible, always in motion and able to let go. I wish I could let go of myself and instead describe California, the bridges, the ocean, the hills, the swelling emotions of the bay.
But I choose to remain in the malaise, beneath the lethargy of this indirect pressure from family to give up my creativity and pursue the lucrative secure life- of the dentist, the lawyer, the computer engineer. To be more ambitious. When my grandmother counsels me on this matter I feel like a nun who is forced to make love. It is possible, but cruel, impure. The life they see and hope for me would destroy me, my spirit, my already fragile identity and sense of self. They say I am idealistic, not practical. And this observation, though true, comes to feel like an insult, not a celebration of what I am by nature. And I begin to feel freakish, like I am a disappointment to everyone, to everything, to God.
But when I stand for my passions and am loyal to my creativity, no matter how disagreeable this may seem to those I love, I find my freedom, and I mature personally and artistically. Intellectually and emotionally. I have to liberate myself, even from those who love me and want a better life for me.
Am I ready to settle down, make others' dreams of what is right for me come true? I know that if I were a flower, rooted and stationary, I would badger the bee for explanations, stories, and detailed descriptions of what it's like to fly, to be free, to see beyond the horizon.
I know I'm not the only lonely person in the world. I know you're out there, severed also, disconnected for whatever reason. In fact, I know I don't have it that badly at all. I've no right to complain.
Vivian, too, is lonely. She is alone in Berkeley- a strange place, without a single friend or relative to turn to, to touch her, to comfort her. She called earlier and when Jackie handed the receiver to me Vivian broke down crying. She could barely get a word in amidst the choking and sniveling. How my heart went out to her, how I wanted to cry with her- my adorable Vivian all by herself, scared, alone. Intelligent, articulate, competent, but nineteen, helpless, homesick.
"You don't understand how much I could use a hug right now. Just one hug," she wept into the telephone.
'Darling, I am hugging you,' I assured her.
We compared notes on the state of loneliness we both felt having moved to strange new places- our supposed homes. I took the phone out into the yard and picked twigs off bushes while listening to the friend in need. I looked onto the hill that peaks up from behind the back fence, searching for the right thing to say, for my own source of strength and compassion, overcome by a genuine sense of brotherly responsibility for Vivian.
She said she felt better and I wanted desperately to believe her. Is it ever that easy or lasting to feel comforted in loneliness?
When I hung up the phone I felt my own sense of isolation very near and very real, but at least I knew that I was not alone in this. Neither was Vivian. And neither are millions of people across the globe.
Jackie had by now retired to her room and I was sitting in the silence of night in Novato, amidst the hills that were mere black outlines in the distance, when I began to feel the same defiance I had felt earlier in the day. I knew once again that I do not want to live all my life being a dog of society and my own family, doing silly tricks to please and be patted. I want my independence. But first I must, it seems, earn my own respect!

The poet loses composure and blows everything well out of proportion. He is deeply sensitive and highly emotional. He loses control and clings to the night as if night were happiness itself! It is only natural that he'd lose his head; this loss is the tool with which he writes outlandishly, fantastically, impractically. Dramatically. But when the poet gets intensely melodramatic, and begins to live my life outside the page, I find I have to temper him with my intellect, thus living a double life between the romantic ruins of diaphanous adjectives and sober equilibrium- coasts on opposite sides of an ununited continent!

On campus I begin to wake to giant trees covered in moss, a faded sign that reads "Redwood Trees", damp planks of bridges crossing low streams, the hills, and the aromas of air after a night of rain.
I take the bus back to downtown Novato, which is calm, not hectic, with many barber shops, a shoe repair shop, banks, an insurance office, and an old-fashioned hardware store. Finally, I step into a pet shop where little mice, white and childlike, play on an ever-spinning wheel, falling onto each other in white-fur clusters. I imagine they are laughing.
A salesperson, whose face is peculiarly long, and a customer allow baby bearded dragons to crawl on their t-shirts. I watch them, conscious that in relation to the afternoon that is jovial and sunny I am dark and forlorn.
"Which one do I want?" the customer deliberates. "I like this one. It's fat. Oh dear, I wonder if I've hurt the other's feelings…" Clearly the woman is entertained by herself, talking in a voice that is oddly squeaky, as if she talks to a baby.
In my gloom I can't help but laugh at the foolish woman, to myself, of course. Finding her silly, "American". But I know that I am looking through my mother's eyes when my perception has been stern.
Assyrians think Americans frivolous and immature, that they have been spoiled by their lifestyles of consumption and overindulgence, while Assyrian history has been riddled with war and poverty, religious persecution and continuous uncertainty. We are a serious people in comparison.
I live and chuckle ironically within this divide, myself an orphan of such divisions and contradictions. My homeland remains the space in-between, nameless, borderless. A citizen and son of nowhere and no one in particular, I step back onto the street, into the sun that shines without a passport.
I walk into the house, into the scent of grilled eggplant, bell pepper, and garlic. I come home to emphatic greetings from Mom-Suzie and Jackie who stand in the frame of the front door. I chuckle at the silliness of my inner journeys which continue to daily estrange and reunite me, full circle, to my family.
Sometimes I'm sure I'm not one person!

Jackie takes her car into the shop. I accompany her. When she is in the office settling her bill I strike up a conversation with a young mechanic named Peter. He is skinny, swift, almost inhuman in the way he moves about the car he is fixing, talking as he works. Agile like an animal. I am not necessarily smitten but can feel the sexuality in his movements, and the way he seems conscious of being watched. Immediately I like the showman that he is. He is polite and charming- qualities I had not expected from a mechanic in the midst of cars, oil stains, unfamiliar scents, and calendar girls. He asks if Jackie is my girlfriend and is surprised to find she is my aunt. He says he just assumed that we were dating since we have come together. Now he tells me about his passion for boats and water-skiing on weekends. I say that I have never water-skied. He insists I ought to, that it's perhaps one of the best things in the world, exciting and invigorating. In his quick sleek manner he hands me his number and invites me along that same weekend, pulling a picture of his beloved boat from his wallet. In the picture he stands shirtless on the deck of the small boat. "I used to have a mustache," he points out and continues, "I'm twenty-seven." I thank him nervously but decline the invitation, noting his boyish enthusiasm. Driving home Jackie admits that she found Peter's abrupt invitation for the weekend odd. 'You don't think he was picking me up, do you?' I venture. And we laugh, not nervously. I wonder when I will come out to her.
That same afternoon we watch "Jeopardy" together. Isaac Mizrahi is one of the star contestants and is funny, charming, and uniquely attractive. He wears a wonderfully daring green suit and an equally colorful and insouciant tie. Jackie and I chuckle at his remarks and jokes finding him cute and loveable. I am relived to find Jackie embracing his obviously queer personality, without holding his effeminacy against him. On the contrary, Mizrahi seems to have won my aunt completely over!
Jackie confesses that she is worried about my mother's impending arrival given her defensive attitude and demonstrative dissatisfaction concerning the move. I suppose I'm not terribly disheartened by Jackie's confession as it relates to my own mother, they are after all sisters and have a right to their own relationship and process. I will stand safely to the side and give each of them a knowing nod and a smile of hope and love. I ask God for the strength and patience with which to love these women in my life- not tomorrow, but here and now. I also feel that all the writing has prepared me for this moment, the journal entries, the psychic poems, the sketches. My masterpiece remains this desire to provide solace to each woman- my mother, my aunt, my grandmother.
The rooms in which I sleep may change, but I find I am exactly the same person I was when I was a child of five. Nineteen years have not changed me a damn bit. They've just added layers- layers of filth, cynicism, artifice, and benevolence. I feel my core to be as pristine as a grain of sand in a desert.

Mom-Suzie skims through the glossy pages of a fashion catalogue and chuckles, "Sunflowers are everywhere these days…" She tells me childhood stories of growing up in a village where as a young girl she would cut the immense flower from its tall leaning stalk and eat the soft fresh seeds with great impatience. I smile reflectively and tell her that I remember doing the same in Iran, on summer vacations to the village where my father grew up. I understand the irony my grandmother sees all around her in the western climate she has come to call home. A place where empty renditions of things she holds dear and real may appear in something as prosaic as a clothing catalogue. Iran, tradition, survival, war, and sunflowers. When I ask her if she has any desire to return to Iran she surprises me by scoffing and saying, "Never!"
There is so much delicacy and subtlety in life that I want to capture here, and when the moment comes for me to attempt to grace these pages with these fragile impressions I experience a certain pang of dread that I will fail them with the improper word, a novice positioning of phrases, a chaotic arrangement of volatile notes, and disturb the quietude of prose. I worry that you'll think me vague, or worse yet, pretentious. But this is a journal of live music, a writer's gymnasium where I might fall before others, and hopefully I will fall beautifully, gracefully. And we will laugh together. Here I begin to emerge from graceless attempts and enter fluid ends. I will no longer apologize for my efforts.
And remember, poetry is illusive as it travels as nuances do on the underbelly of a moment. Poetry is the music in the tilt of an abandoned barn, the hurried step of a fugitive in flight, the turning of a familiar face, and the way the sun falls into a room revealing the true textures of things we thought we owned and knew so well.
Sifting through the mounds of garbage in my head I estimate that for every ton of refuse there hides an ounce of poetry!
Speaking of poetry, bus rides to and from the campus are breathtaking as the bus swerves, glides, and turns in and out of civilization, on petulant asphalt, around lakes. A gorgeous Latin boy was seated across from me recently. I could not help but notice and secretly admire his beautiful brown hair, brown eyes, brown skin, enjoying most secretly the straight cut of his nose, the soundless protrusion of his lovely lips, and the distance in his eyes that never met mine. I felt desire just then move inside my clothes, through my body- desire for success and love. I looked out the windows of the bus and saw hills, homes, memories, and my own imagination looking back at me. When alone I am like a child, relishing being out on my own in the world, taking my surroundings in like a sponge made out of flesh and blood.
I can't allow myself to become bored with life again as I so easily do. I can't allow my routine to feel like routine because it would only make me crazy. I will think up new thoughts, new ideas, characters, and plots in my head, entertain myself through the many ordinary moments of life. So many.

I feel intimate with the present.
I have been helping out my great-uncle George at his small business in the food court of a mall in San Rafael. Recently a customer touched me with his gleaming expressive eyes. He spoke with a voice that was warm, a smile on his face all the while. He was polite, serene. Throughout our exchange I knew that I wanted to live the rest of my life with just such a man. I would not hurt him or eat him alive. When he approached the service counter to pick up the meals he'd purchased for himself and his wife I found myself saying, 'Please apologize to your wife for me. I was unable to toss her salad because I don't have the means. These plates don't allow it.' He said, "I understand. Don't worry. You've been more than helpful. In fact, I've fallen madly in love with you over the course of seven minutes…"
Mom's at Casa De Maria for the weekend watching over things, which gives me a chance to spend time with Jackie and my grandmother here at the house. We have been laughing and conversing for hours, enjoying one another. Finally I have received the family I longed for all those lonely years in Chicago, as a teenager. The three of us have so much to talk about, and we speak with enthusiasm, listen and respond to each other with our hearts. Tonight I felt an intimacy that I had not felt for a long time and it brought tears to my eyes. I had to discreetly leave the living room to compose myself. I felt so synchronized tonight with Mom-Suzie and Jackie, related, sharing ideas, memories, bits of wisdom in Assyrian and laughing at ourselves. The Assyrian language can oftentimes sound and be so abrasive and rough, but it always conveys so much so deeply, so passionately. I wish so much that mom could be a part of this, but I'm not sure that she's ready to allow herself. As of yet we seem to be the obstacles in her path, obstacles she loves. She feels her way in this darkness and scratches us unwittingly, kicks us involuntarily. When all she has to do is merely open her eyes.
I love my family with a heart that is more immense than I ever knew. A heart I am through searching for in strangers.

Complex. Vigilant. Without hope. Paranoid. Defeated and defensive. Pensive. Always brooding- I can tell by the way her mouth twists. Her name might be Violate, Violent, Violin. It's not. It's Violet. My mother. My nurturer. My nemesis. My challenge, obligation, responsibility. Complex…
We are at Casa De Maria, in the yard, in the Northern California wind, strangers. Before coming here to spend the day with her I thought out my approach, planned my demeanor, drafted my behavior. I would be circumspect.
I look at the sky, stare at the corolla of a nearby flower, observe a black moth, avoid my mother's perpetually defeated eyes. Eyes a color I have never been able to define- light brown? Green? Orange! Inside I resent her. Rather, her weakness, her inability to give up the trivialities of her life, her insistence on playing the victim. Qualities I see in myself in the mornings when it is quiet in the house and the streets are sleeping. Qualities that rule my life also. I want to say to her, I understand, mom… But I don't.
Not today.
The sensitivity. This hypersensitivity, which makes me write, which enables me to see and to bleed.
Our sensitivity. Our hypersensitivity, which makes us critical, our disagreements detrimental, our view of the world erroneous. But ours, nonetheless.
I don't meet her eyes in the yard because I know I will see myself in the broken mirror. And I know better these days. I know that it is not others who hurt me. I injure myself.
So, we palaver instead of talking sincerely, churning inside. I force my voice to sound chipper, all the while thinking that we are doomed as mother and son by our own sadness, my pity and resentment for her, and by her disappointment in me. I am defiant against this reticence, which tries to pass as safety, security, simulating softness, silk, protection. Maybe it's God, maybe it's luck, maybe it's our own doing, but soon the distance melts away even in the wind that rouses the flowers in the yard, and we are somehow comfortable, suddenly close, conversing fluidly, frankly, with so much to say that wasn't there before.
It seems that we are tickled by the wind itself.
War buddies.
Exchanging stories.
"As long as you're happy so am I," she says into the space between us. Again I am vexed by this sort of sacrificial, self-effacing utterance whose every syllable burdens me, and I remember my grievance for our culture, which dictates such intensity and pressure, this unhealthy interdependence.
My compassion for my own mother lies in this indignation I possess for my culture which presses a woman into believing that her very own sense of self and well-being is directly tied to her family, what they might think of her, how well she has served and controlled them, and how their decisions in life might effect her! She is emotionally, psychologically, even spiritually linked to them, precariously dependent on them.
I wonder how I will ever set her free knowing well that often a caged animal cannot fend for itself once on its own.
Mental captivity, though oppressive, in this instance continues to sustain her throughout her lifetime. I try to touch her from the other side but she does not see my hand through the obstruction of her listlessness.
But a sigh of resignation here is not enough for me. I see my opportunity to suggest a solution, give hope, sow happiness, resuscitate the forlorn heart, carefully, unobtrusively, with examples. By way of illustrations I sidle to my point. I tell her of Maya Angelou's determination and success as a woman who was otherwise destitute. My voice is calm and proud, yet pleading and desperate.
My great-uncle George has told the family that he is impressed with my initiative at work, helping in any way I can, giving more than expected. Mom-Suzie says her arm feels lighter, aches less because of the massages I've been giving her. Jackie seems less lonely, less despondent.
I will shame them out of their homophobia not by being false and pretending to be someone else, something else, but by being as real as I was when I was a child. I am pure again. Original again. Myself again…

I don't drink. I don't smoke. I don't crave friendship. I only fulfill the last urge left in my being- writing!
At the food court George and I take a break from the lapping grill, sit amidst the many shoppers at a small table of our own, eat our meal, and talk. I had hoped that working with George would bring us closer as I do not know him that well, but I had not expected this kind of intimate exchange. George seems hungry for a friend, a confidant, and divulges secrets that shock me.
He is in his sixties, slender, his cheeks are sunken, he dyes his hair a dark brown, has clear blue eyes. He wears that terminally worried look about him, comes across as gentle and meek, but there's something else there, a mischievous little boy, one who plays unfairly. He tells me terrific stories about his divorce from Sylvana, the mother of his two teenage boys. Stories I can only compare to a Spy vs. Spy cartoon. The two are constantly at battle spreading wild rumors and half-truths about each other in a community that is already too privy, meddling, judgmental, and unforgiving. The community that I keep at an arm's length, where one's reputation is a constantly precarious thing, situated below the belt!
George tells me things I did not know, recounts a family history that might or might not be fabricated, and I listen uncomfortably, picking at my food in the din of the mall.
He says that his ex-wife's father, an Assyrian, Christian of course, kept a Muslim Iranian lover for many years, an affair that resulted in an illegitimate child. And that he was often drunk and unruly.
Having myself been brought up in a home that led me to believe Assyrians are pious people, righteous folk, I am deeply shocked still to discover otherwise, by these stories of desire, infidelity, exposing our humanness. Growing up in Iran, and here in the States, I have heard it countless times how immoral Americans are in comparison to Assyrians, even animalistic in their pursuits of sex and frivolity, that supposedly Assyrians are far more moral, spiritual, somehow better. But I have always sensed it- Assyrians are no better or different than any other ethnicity or nationality. Assyrians just take the time to cover their tracks, unwrinkled their suits and untangle their skirts. Americans simply live with different taboos. How dare we, in moments of high self-righteousness, think ourselves purer, more supreme? It just isn't so…
Growing up for me has meant unearthing our very own fallibility and humanness.
George continues, his eyes widening boyishly, his eyebrows arching dramatically, to illustrate the supposed bad stock from which his ex-wife comes. He says that one of her two brothers was even hung by the Fundamentalists in Iran because he, too, was nothing more than a trouble-making animal.
I listen like a good Assyrian relative and do not interject with my own views and objections, understanding that this is his only crime, weakness, and pleasure now that everything is said and done and his marriage is over. He is more naïve than malicious. Just a little boy.
He confesses that only months before Sylvana had stopped by his house one afternoon to have sex with him, and afterward while they dressed he had said to her, "See how much you enjoyed yourself? It was good, wasn't it?"
Sylvana had shrugged coldly and proclaimed, "I could get that any time for forty dollars!"
This exchange had again set off one more episode of character assassination between the two, involving others in the community- setting friends and family members against one another, spreading malaise.
"One day she went to a peach orchard in Turlock with a married man to pick fruit. Now tell me why a separated woman and a married man would do that?" he asks rhetorically. I nod softly. George goes on to illustrate how salacious this man is, that in Chicago he owned a Subway sandwich shop where he used to fuck two of his female employees. I am floored.
We return to the grill after our break where Janet, a Guatemalan girl my age, meaty and sultry, flirtatious and lazy, leans against the register chewing gum, floating somewhere in space and lost dreams. George leaves us to run errands. Janet points to a thick-lipped young Latino who swishes past the grill. She says, "He likes boys."
'How do you know?' I challenge her, miffed at her indiscretion, one hand on my hip.
"He lives where I live," she explains simply in her Spanish accent, looking at me as though I have been the one to say something unwarranted.
'Do you know him?' I press.
"No," she answers defensively, "He's not my friend."
'There's nothing wrong with him, Janet,' I feel obliged to defend my stranger kin, 'I have friends who are like him and they are good people. It doesn't matter if you like boys or girls as long as you're a decent person.' I am somewhat ashamed of myself for not having had the courage to out myself, but I'm not ready for my great-uncle to know this about me and surely babble it to others in the family.
The Latino passes again and I admire him for being who he is, for living and not having killed himself as a teenager as so many of us do because we live in communities that circuitously tell us we are freakish, lie to us that we will live cursed lives if we continue as we are! I send him my love.
Creatively I continue to harbor this fear of writing something passionless, that I will produce pieces that have no particular voice, no depth, no emotion, no purpose, no music and waves, no wind and serenity.
Though, sexually I am reawakened. Sensuality visits like a mute lover, quietly, temporarily. My orgasms are pleasurable, rippling through my entirety. My penis feels larger than ever in my grip, warm, alive. I feel young, virile, healthy, and beautiful. I am full of life, which bursts out of me into the room and back to me, clinging to my stomach in hot white streaks of eroticism. I feel aroused and sensual for the first time without fear of myself and what I might do that will be degrading and self-defeating. Just because my imagination is naked and lascivious it does not mean that I have to be dangerous and impulsive.
It is late. Goodnight romance. Goodnight life…

George says he no longer wants to live a sheltered and monitored life under the watchful eye of the heavy-handed Assyrian community. He is in his sixties and wants to really live for the first time in his life. His new resolution is to have fun, play as he never did when he was a young man fulfilling his family duties and cultural obligations. He purchases a Camaro. I openly and verbally encourage his defiance, knowing well his plight and the same oppressive pressures.
At last my family acknowledges the dangers of having been severe in their views and fears, how much these things have hindered their own development. George says Nana, his mother, was "too Christian", his father stringent. Mom too now says what I have screamed for years- Assyrians are too strict and judgmental while Americans remain too lax.
George, now searching for his liberty, asks me things that make me sad for him:
"Am I aging? Do I look older than that man? Do you get a lot of girls because you're handsome?"
One afternoon when the grill is at a lull and we are alone, George and I, he leans casually on the counter and stares out onto the food court. He asks, "Do you have a steady girlfriend?"
I am not in the least alarmed by the conversational inquiry as these kinds of questions are to be expected in life, but I am slightly offended, slightly leery because I am used to being misunderstood. I try to be as truthful as possible and say that I haven't the time or the financial means to be in a relationship what with school and having just moved again. George looks wistful and agrees that one has to be financially secure to properly court a woman, and he elaborates grimly.
When I walk away from this exchange I feel a precarious sense of relief and I know that this is so because I have not been truthful, but fearful.
An older Iranian gentleman visits us almost daily. He has friendly sleepy eyes that seem to linger on the edge of sorrow, but from the softness of his voice I know he is at peace. I attempt to speak Farsi with him and am awkward, but he is always patient and amused, which pleases me. I sometimes surprise us both by uttering a profound or complicated phrase, words I find in a room in my body I have not visited in thirteen years. When they come out of me in Northern California, in America, in the afternoon, in a mall, I wonder where they have been hiding all these years. He tells me that he goes back to Iran, to Tehran once a year. I'm jealous, I tell him playfully.
'I wish I could go,' I say longingly.
"You're young. One day you'll return to Iran," the man reassures me gently. And I believe him.
We then talk about the importance of exercise and he tells me I ought to work out, that I have the potential for a magnificent muscular physique. For a moment I am convinced he is flirting with me.
When I go home I masturbate thinking about him. I imagine he has a dark, thick penis with an unusually large glans. Later in the evening I change my mind- he has not been flirting with me. I am merely horny!
Good things are happening. But I know that if I hadn't had to endure the early hardships of youth and being queer, as well as an immigrant, I would not have begun to write. Poetry and my diary were my rewards for living my life and not successfully killing myself. Even within the great confusion and mystery of my life I knew there was a reason for the suffering, but I would have never guessed it was this- writing.
Writing, drawing, being imaginative were just always a part of life for me in one sense or another. We did these things in school, at home, for a grade and as hobbies. They were normal activities. No one treated them as assets in the family, nor did they comment on them, encourage us, or even acknowledge their existence. So, I didn't think them a gift. Now I thank God that somehow I began writing and had an undying desire to say something, to capture the experiences before they could capture and torture me. Now I see more than ever that I created as much for emotional survival as I did out of artistic necessity. All I ever needed were oxygen, food, water, love, and a pencil. I still need these. I try not to become too conscious of all this, fearing that in total recognition and appreciation I will come to miss the mystery and mysticism of life and art, and will cease to pursue the promise.

Seems most of my time is spent being shaken, jostled, and thrown on buses through winding roads on beautiful hills. This afternoon on the way to work after classes I became suddenly and intolerably restless, sat forward in my seat, but could go no further. I became acutely conscious of the fact that I was dizzy and detached from the other passengers. I was an idea in a material setting. Too much thinking. Too much imagination.
On campus I came to feel lonely seeing others in groups, laughing, talking, sitting in the shade, and told myself to be patient, breathed in the air, the hills, the hope. Foolish loneliness. I continued to walk on and soon realized that I am not alone. I don't walk alone, think alone, or live and dream alone. Anais accompanies me everywhere I am.
In coming to terms with my imaginative nature, my imaginative life, I must understand that I myself am real, living in a human body, through the passage of the everyday, like everyone else. And that I am no exception to the rule, that I must work, go to school, take busses, feel humiliation and defeat, joy and jealousy like everyone else. Creativity does not exempt me. My eccentricities do not excuse me.
I live on a scale that teeters precariously between dream and reality.
My Iranian friend, the middle-aged gentleman, asks if I keep a diary. I am shocked by his perceptiveness and adore him with childlike verve for it. My adoration for him is deeply erotic and I desire him, want to feel him against me, naked and pristine.
Submission. Eroticism. Emotion. Imagination. Wanting men to want me no matter who they are, where they come from, and least of all what they look like and how much money they make. To the naked eye sex is the amalgamation of bodies, but more truthfully it is of minds- intangible dramas in action, ascent.
I am queer if queer means one who has taken his personal path despite the mystery, been true to his psychological destiny, lived even while something inside continued to die, die…
I have a pristine desire from childhood to be conquered by one of my own sex! Poetically, beautifully, inwardly, without dirt, death, disease.

I have a crush on Juan, a Guatemalan man of twenty-eight who works with us at the grill. I like his color, the shape of his head, his black hair that courses forward, deep square eyes, pouting lips, always cordial, always polite. He asks me to teach him English and asks many questions. He is a husband and a father to a small family that waits for him back home, and receives money from him for a house they dream to build in Guatemala. Secretly I wish for a sexual episode and simultaneously chastise myself.
At night, alone at the bus stop on the side of the freeway, I sing, come to unexplainable tears of life, of joy, and know I am still alive, independent from all ties, past friendships. The freedom I feel when alone allows me to roam, to grow, to live without having to consider everyone else's feelings and opinions. Alone I commit no communal errors.
Jackie and I stay up late having a spontaneous conversation that snowballs well into two o'clock in the morning. Seems that Jackie has lost her faith in humanity, her emotional stamina, and I think this is a dangerous reality for many of us. I listen and do not tell her that she must replace this loss with another, more constructive idea that might sustain her through the day. For me this is done by writing, in finding a purpose within the page, inside the ring of words. Listening, I begin to see the real darkness with which my young disenchanted aunt lives. Her views of people, life, marriage, and purpose are grim, so much so that I grow restless and want to run, run, run. But I stay. Listen. And as we talk she seems to outgrow her own hopelessness. Perhaps she has become conscious of it while uttering the words out loud. I don't know. It does not seem to matter at the moment.
I am pleased, though, to hear that she has been recently questioning her faith in a Christian God and the church. Having been brought up by Mom-Suzie whose devotion is deep, Jackie, too, spent her adolescents and her twenties following in similar footsteps. She now says she used to be so judgmental, so certain of so many things, of right and wrong, but that entering her thirties as a single Assyrian woman who runs a business in Northern California, away from everything familiar and dear, has been a real turning point for her, intellectually, emotionally, and certainly spiritually.
Here I begin to realize just how naïve and idealistic I have been, that there is so much more to life than coming to terms with sexuality, and that perhaps life is so much bigger, harder than I ever could have imagined. There is materialism, war, violence, loss of faith and hope.
Jackie again confesses that she is totally heartbroken about our family's inability to unite. Her face changes once more to a serious countenance that shows so well in the absence of makeup, her hair tied back, the light so soft in the room, so intimate, so dim. She apologizes for complaining but maintains that she has to say it, she has to let it out- she is tired of mom's refusal to become a loving part of our new life together, and of her brother Sam's inclination to turn suddenly violent and irrational, the constant falling in and out, in and out, in and out.
"I feel so exhausted and powerless," Jackie proclaims with a last reserve of compassion as if she's gasping for air. We have drawn our legs to our chests, huddled in the sofa, into the huge pillows that cannot contain our disappointments.
Jackie may feel powerless, but I don't feel that I am. I am intent on guiding my mother to a better place, closer, lovingly, somehow… After all, I come from her, don't I?
Now as I write about it, I hope to never experience the loss that Jackie has. It is much too final- like suicide. When one loses hope what else is there? Money? Property? I don't mind losing a limb, even love, family, but hope? No drug, no machine can reawaken me from the death of my hopes. I know this.
I choose to live, live well, live fully. Maybe even blindly, but I do not see with my eyes anyway. In this world eyes are useless. I choose to see with my heart because the heart lies deeper, is protected by layers of tissue and muscle. The eyes are so precarious, so defenseless.