October 1997

I desire continuity in my life, unity. So I stop dating my journal entries, no more double-spacing between the days. The time, the date, the day of the week, the calendar year are all superfluous, unnecessary. Linear illusions. Emotions are the psychic realities, the ultimate calendar. I hunger for grace, uniformity.
I want October's inauguration to be cheerfully flawless, but having just battled self-contempt and great insecurity- and it's only nine A.M.- it will be difficult to suddenly be pleasant and upbeat.
All my childhood fears and inferiorities gripped me at the gym today. I stood by a window unable to move, and pretended to be waiting for somebody, looking often at my wristwatch, pacing. I could not bring myself to step foot on the floor where others, men and women of all shapes, ages, and sizes exercised. I could not for the life of me join. It was as if I had voyaged back to junior high school where I dreaded changing in the boys' locker room, to expose my flaws to others, and to ultimately compete.
I was young then, shy, an overweight foreign child. Hopelessly awkward. Gay. Today I am not the same person, but was equally terrified. I couldn't help but compare myself to the other men and shook at the knees with inferiority. I tried logic. Stepped outside into the morning sun and tried to calm myself: You're not here to impress. You're not here to compete. Do your own thing.
But the fear was too familiar and impressive. I finally had to leave without having exercised. Even the cheerful woman at the front desk noticed my hasty departure and said smilingly, "Leaving already?"
'Quickest workout you've ever seen, right?' I joked and kept walking.
So, there you have it. I have issues. I have this strange complex that people are watching me, rating me, laughing at me because surely I must be failing miserably.
I have so much work to do in life. I feel entirely overwhelmed.
Now mom is mothering me. I have to go play the son game. How did I end up here?
Writing poetry is my method of self-hypnosis. Only symbolically can I reveal and unburden myself. Through poetry I am able to confess my desires, dreams, wishes, failures, and fears. It has taken me nine years of writing to come to understand this phenomenon, and accept it. In poetry lies prophecy, foreshadowing. Through poetry I sketch my vision of the future, no matter how nebulously. In real life I dread the future in all its guises. In poetry I step into it easily. Writing is my birth and rebirth.
Days are spent dreaming because I cannot hold on to anything here, anything real, anything that pertains to others. I do not know what it is they want of me. I do not even know who they are, really, these people I love. In relation to one another they continue to shift and shatter. I can't even imagine what they do or think when they are alone in a room.
It feels like I am barefoot, picking fruit in an orchard. Apples, oranges, pomegranates. I cannot contain every delicious fruit. I cradle my pickings in my arms, but there are too many and I constantly drop something. When I pick one fruit another falls. I am so busy in this hopeless task that I never arrive at my cool resting place where I might enjoy my abundant pickings.
I step on a pebble that is sharp and pierces my skin, shooting jagged ripples of pain to my heart. My mother has just broken the news that she will be moving to Sausalito where she will become the live-in help of an elderly man. I have no choice but to throw all the fruit asunder and doctor the odious aching that begins at the cut in my foot and ends nowhere.
'But will you be able to handle it emotionally, that kind of living arrangement?'
Of course there are snakes even in this manicured garden! Why would I think otherwise?
"Anything's better than living here," she says exhaustedly.
Already it feels like years ago when I plucked ripe dreams from perfect rows of auspicious trees.
The hissing I'd heard like wind through the branches was all along a thing far more tangible, constricting. Poisonous!
I had chosen to overlook the fact that the leaves weren't rustling. They were motionless the entire time.
I am naked, about to dive from a cliff. I am shivering with fear and anticipation, with naiveté. Below a huge pillow… stuffed with iron feathers… I leap…out of the page and into my own skin.
When I look back I see that I have not parted a sea. I have merely caused ripples in waters that already possessed waves.
Luay calls. We are the only queer Assyrians in the world when we are conversing over the phone. It is so intimate and tender.
"We are friends for life," he tells me.
And I become filled with a surge of desire to see him soon, for us to become closer, more constant.
The news tells us that the Catholic Church now accepts its gay sons and daughters. Jackie rolls her eyes, "Like we needed their permission." It seems that I have indeed found my momentary patch of cool, soft grass where I may rest and sigh, my foot soothed by the elements.
I fall asleep knowing that all along I have scapegoated a general cluster of ignoble gay "men" for my unwillingness to enter into a romantic relationship, and that I blame their immaturity, their insatiability in sex, their base promiscuity. But I realize that it is not "men" who keep me from the adventure and pursuit of love, but my own unwillingness to accept that sex- no matter how perverse I may think it- is natural, universal, inevitable. I am part responsible in this…
One day I will meet the ideal partner and gasp at having discovered him in an enduring friendship!
Woke up one morning to half-dream-voices calling me to work with other alcoholics.
After work one night, George asks for my advice concerning his burgeoning relationship with Janet. Again he mentions marriage. I can't help but sound urgent, and without overstepping boundaries try to reason with him that Janet cannot possibly love him, that she shows too many unpromising signs of being after one thing only- his money. And on this night, never to repeat this rare exchange, I tell George exactly what I think of his relationship with Janet.
'George, just because you're used to being mistreated all your life it does not mean you have to continue to seek mistreatment. You deserve better!' I feel ineffectual in the passenger seat, buckled in, tied down, awkward in advising my great-uncle, thirty-plus years my senior.
He stares dazedly out the windshield where light falls in yellow patches on the black asphalt.
'Yeah… I am used to being mistreated,' he exhales into the cramped cab of the Camaro.
But I lose him to an internal war I'm certain he fights daily, moment to moment.
"But she does love me," he says after some moments of silence, "She says she doesn't care about the money. That I could give it to my children and she wouldn't mind."
'Of course, she says that, George. She probably believes it herself,' I say instinctively before I've thought it through, instantly regretting it. I continue, 'Look George, you're a great guy, you look great, but you think you're too old, that it's too late for you, that there's nothing good out there for you. There is a more suitable woman in the world for you if you just give yourself some time. Please.'
He then pats me on the shoulder saying something tender in Assyrian that cannot be rightly translated. He is touched that I should care.
We arrive at my bus stop just off of Highway 101. 'You're my great-uncle and I don't want to hurt you but I won't lie to you, either. Not even to please you. Just think about this…'
I get out of the car. Stepping into the night that is cool I am suddenly taken by emotion, by irony. Others in the family ask me to keep an eye on George, to give him heart because they say he looks too thin and must be depressed.
Moments later, while standing in the dark waiting for the bus, a giant owl that had been roosting quietly on a nearby light post suddenly takes flight. It swoops down over me and has a wingspan that stretches well beyond the length of my own arms. I am startled both by the size of the bird and its beauty, but the moment is perfect and I reel.
Even as I write I am certain that George manipulates the family, soliciting their attention and sympathy by confiding in us. In my family we express love by worrying and hardly know anything else.
Let George spoil his last chance at living, let dad, let mom, let Bell, let them all! I will not allow their desperation and my love for them ruin my chances.
I have to understand that I am not a failure when the ones I love fail me. I can only sooth them, not revolutionize them.
It is because emotions are so ethereal and amorphous that I've no choice but to write about them. It is because they are so difficult to feel that I must follow their trail with words, pursue their shadows not with guns, but adjectives. And yet I am so afraid of surrendering to the task of writing. Terrified each time I open my diary and confront an empty page- white, lined, and vast. Bottomless.
I'm sure that someone I love will someday break my spirit by saying, "Emil, the hills you write about are just hills! They are not the crouching dreamers you see, nor hibernating climaxes. They are only hills!"
But I will remain steadfast and argue, 'No, you're mistaken. Those hills are so much more. They are my dreams- great, green, and fermenting.'
I realize that my imagination is as much religion to me as Christianity is to others. Therefore, I have no right to criticize Christianity as I so often do. But it is not faith, conviction, or having a sense of responsibility that I condemn, it is narrow-mindedness, bigotry, misogyny. As an artist I am not in the least opposed to ceremony or symbolism, only superstition and fear.
A Muslim customer, a Palestinian, says Allah is the only way. He assumes as so many others do that because I was born in Iran I must be Muslim. Frustrated that yet again someone feels the need to tell me who and what is the "only way" I purposely reveal to the man that I am Assyrian, brought up Christian. He fumbles now, clearly looking as though he wishes he'd not been presumptuous, and sheepishly says, "Christians say Jesus is the only way and Muslims say Allah. Who's right, ha?" I am desperate to be left alone, deeply agitated.
I realize that my childish bluntness has embarrassed the man and to atone for this I admit that I've always wanted to read the Koran. "Maybe I'll give you The Book," he smiles. He is dark and wears a beard, has penetrating Arab eyes. I vaguely know that his people have known great suffering and persecution. We agree that we love the Middle East.
A woman on the bus reaches across the isle and taps me on the arm. She says she thinks my hair is beautiful. "It's like music." She is not old, but carries a cane.
My mother's lack of cooperation is mother to my own. I feel I might never forgive her. And wonder if I'll ever be free of petty inconveniences like my resentments, jealousy, envy, suspicion and mistrust.
One night at the mall, returning from having taken the garbage out, I see a woman smoking a cigarette near the doors. She is crying. I am touched by the way she leans against a column- feminine, defeated, vulnerable. 'It'll be alright,' I tell her as I pass. She chuckles, "Thanks."
I love women. I think Marin might be a woman. Or a wonderful man.
Luay sends me a tape of Arabic music. I am amazed how quickly he made the tape and sent it after a recent phone conversation in which we talked at length about being Assyrian- he from Iraq, I from Iran, the differences, the inevitable similarities. I put the tape on and am deeply struck by the music and how raw and compelling it is. For the first time in my life I hear the true beauty in the Arabic language. Words I do not understand, but feel with my entirety. I imagine that lyrics in Arabic songs are as poetic and melancholic as Persian, accompanied by the buzuq, daff, qanun, the tablah.
Yah habibi…
Through conversations with George I find out that sex and eroticism do exist in their most quintessential form even in Iran. He tells me an Assyrian friend of the family would be visited by young Iranian women in chadors at his restaurant in Tehran, and that the young women would reveal their breasts to him.
He also tells me about the Assyrian taxi driver in Tehran who overheard two young Assyrian passengers giggling over having just fucked the same man. They apparently did not realize that the driver understood what they were saying. He had gotten an erection listening to their erotic interchange in the back seat of the cab.
Yes, we have sexuality! Only most of us would adamantly deny this.
One afternoon at the grill my mind wanders while I lean into the counter and watch the shoppers milling about the food court. I think of parents who disown their adult children for having AIDS. And I am horrified that this should ever occur. I wonder why it is that we attend almost obsessively to our cars, gardens, trivial hobbies, but can bring ourselves to shun our own children. We proudly commit ourselves to a sick vegetable patch, a weak bush, a dying flowerbed, but shirk from embracing and unconditionally loving our very own offspring. How can it be? I do not understand it, this reckless abandonment. I don't care how opposed one may be to homosexuality, how afraid of it, how religious and superstitious, not even ignorance remains a viable excuse.
Jackie says clever things that make me laugh, makes funny faces, and I am moved to kiss her on the cheek. She says to me warmly, "I'm so glad you're here." I am touched. 'Isn't it ironic,' I begin to say as I move into the kitchen that is attached to the family room where we have been bantering, 'that we'd end up living together after all these years?' For so long we were estranged, leading unrelated lives on separate continents, that being in the same room now, living in the same house is a true gift.
Gender is in the mind.
I write as a woman.
She writes about me.
In the process I lose certain inhibitions and gain others.
Her name is Gretchen.
She remains certain that men can be strong and self-certain without having to be despotic; women emotional and intuitive without weakness.
Hope.
Health.
Love.
Acceptance.
Gratitude.
It becomes more and more silly to me that we should waste this single chance at living our precious lives passively hoping and praying for rewards in the afterlife. All the while neglecting our present opportunity at achieving a very real and immediate sense of purpose and completion. Here and now. As we are. Imperfect. I want to concentrate my energy not toward the unknown, but the attainable- love for my family, self, and life. It seems that living for something else, someplace else, would distract us from the deep living and deep loving we could be experiencing now. Here. Why strive for something unknown and uncertain, something so nebulous, when the ones we love are right here, flesh and blood, longing for our acceptance and approval that yes, they are deserving of our acceptance no matter how far they have steered from our expectations? My heaven, my next ten thousand lives are here in me, with me, everywhere.
I am alive and grateful, conscious enough, aware enough to love now, to improve now, to face my nature and death, to inspire, to sing, to live, to write, and to feel, feel, feel…
And now at Casa De Maria, having just matter-of-factly told mother that it is still difficult to love her, to be son and friend to her, I can't help but feel nauseated by my own honesty.
Every day I am tipped over by my own polarized feelings toward my mother.
Twenty-four years ago she suffered excruciating pain in ridding her body of me. Now it seems it is my turn to writhe and shudder, sweat and spasm my way out of the constricting canals of a child's connection to his mother, taking form of the indifferent adult son.
In one day I accept ten thousand realities and uncertainties.
I think of the silent suffering so many of us choose. Injuries we inflict upon ourselves, lives we lose through crevices we create, blaming other reprehensible sources- family, politicians, the Church.
In attempting to augment my self-worth I begin to see my own deficiencies more clearly. I see also that I have brought well into the present and my twenties the inferiorities of the overweight, gay, immigrant thirteen-year-old.
The cold air comes and with it arrives the familiar scent of fireplaces, smoke above the streets. The night. A cup of tea. Streetlamps that betray mist and longings for intimacy, wine, discussion, a life fulfilled by understanding and art, stirred by wishes and touch.
I rummage through the many feelings, out of danger and emergency salvage an authentic joy!
A regular at the grill places a magazine facedown on the counter. On the back cover there is an advertisement for Apple Computers with a photo of Gandhi sitting peacefully in a sparse room.
"Do you know who that is?" the customer asks me.
'Of course I do,' I state.
"Was he respected in your country?"
'I think he was respected all over the world,' is my answer.
Does this man know nothing of unity? I wonder mutely.
Only after he has gone, hours later, am I suddenly offended by this interchange.
A middle-aged couple buys two pita sandwiches but unwittingly walks away with one. By the time I notice they have disappeared into the weekend crowd at the mall. But I must find them and give them what is theirs. It is something I must do. When I spot them they are sitting on a bench, their backs resting against a wall. I see they have finished the sandwich they must have shared. I approach them with a smile and inform them of their blunder, and they laugh, obviously pleased to find there is more food. The husband instructs his wife to remain seated and follows me back to the grill. He thanks me repeatedly, sweetly. He even places his hand on my shoulder as we walk through the shoppers. His hand rests there for a moment. I recognize it as the touch of a friend.
He says, "I assumed that was all we get."
'Pretty expensive meal,' I remark jokingly.
He laughs.
I continue, 'It's interesting that you didn't find it unlikely. It shows how much we anticipate outrageous prices and hardly question it anymore.'
"Very good point," the man says soberly.
If he'd asked I would have met him at a hotel, secretly.
Perhaps the races, the ethnicities, remain nature's dynamic variation on a single theme. Nature is a patient designer holding the patent to our demise… and survival.
Someone greets me with a smile on a dark, shadowy, mellow bus. When he stands to leave he waves to me. I smile warmly- responding to unfathomable mystery. Does this stranger think he knows me?
I learned in my teens that expectations only welcome disappointments. I still exhaust disenchantment with my many expectations of people, things, places. Expectations that reside on the hundredth tier so that the fall is fatal to the ideal. When we return to ourselves after having run to others for security, for reason, for strength, we return to a shattered mirror, which seems to startle us as greatly as it did the first time! Mistakes, even as we learn from them, are no consolation.
I am beginning to suspect that in this universe resolutions do not exist. That what occurs between myself and people, things, and events is much too grand to possess something as limiting as closure, a perfect finish; and that there are no actual beginnings. We merely stumble onto continuations in a series of haphazard crossings that make up a lifetime. We are only transients in an experience that is not ours, does not begin or end with us, and may have nothing to do with us. Life happens with and without us. I am comforted coming to learn this on the morning bus to San Rafael.
I want to say to George, I can no longer work in this tainted atmosphere.
On the bus, in and out of streets, on and off the highway, I finally understand that the street to knowing the self is severely tortuous and without addresses, or a map. Impossible even. Yet, to remain static would be to atrophy from within. I have to overcome some personal doubts and uncertainties to at least gain even a tentative impression of who I might be in this cityscape of an ever-changing self.
Tonight I do not rummage. Tonight I pretend I cannot feel. But if asked I would admit dejection.
If I cannot be happy through the tough times- all of life- then I have not mastered resilience.
Men are lewd.
This is a time of realizing my strengths. But I cannot recognize my strengths without acknowledging my weaknesses. It is like doing a balancing act on a glass scale.
I'm quick to expose others' cowardice and quickly disconnect from them. I must clear my head of these hasty criticisms and be more tolerant and forgiving before I run out of friends and family entirely.
Jackie paints her room a light creamy color. While helping her I come to feel life in my bones, thinking: The days pass and between greater occurrences we have only these moments, and each other.
Aziza and I connect whenever we work together. I want to reach into her, pull myself in, and live inside the sumptuous colors and scents of Morocco, forever in the music.
On a crowded bus I fantasize about an imaginary figure who would utilize this occasion to rub himself surreptitiously against me until climaxing. The same day, in Human Sexuality, the instructor tells us about frottage. I smirk privately…
Assyrians censor themselves and one another. I have always fought this traditional ban, this enforced reticence. It is not encouraged that one speak his or her mind. We bottle everything up until it is too late and we erupt at each other. So, it is thus that we have come to associate honesty with anger. Being honest is considered contrary, ill-natured, malevolent. All my life it seems my mother has sat me down before the arrival of guests to list off the things I can and cannot bring up in company. And when I say, 'Oh mother, why would I ever say that?' She says, "I don't know. You have a tendency to say whatever you want!"
Imagination haunts me even in my sleep. I suppose anything can happen in Sleep Café. Something precious is falling and to break its ruinous fall I throw myself in its path. I wake up to the dark, on the floor next to my bed, the sheets entangled about me, feeling foolish and confused.
Imagination. A force I have contended with all my life. All those drawings, all the poems- good and terrible- all that avid dreaming, prelude to something that has yet to occur: my crowning as a writer.
In my youth I was so immersed in dreaming that I felt the danger of imagination, and how it could at any given moment affect my real life adversely. The danger lay I suppose in my inability to externalize what I imagined in a fair, communicative, and tangible manner. Everyone wondered what was wrong with me and their speculations never seemed accurate. They could never have imagined.
Even my fights with my father were never just common traumas to the two of us. They were an opportunity to come forward and reach out brazenly. On these occasions I said things that were not only shocking but true- expressing my love, my rage, my need to be honest. Honesty and anger.
There has never been a need in my life to tell lies, to write wildly. I have never had to resort to fiction and sensationalism. The truth is novel enough, strange enough. All I've ever had to do in fights and in writing is traverse the accepted boundaries and smuggle the truth with me.
Imagination forms my reality. From bouts of fear to surrendering to joy my imagination is the creator of my destiny.
But it has taken work, as well as daily near-death experiences, to arrive at some sense of practicality regarding imagination and creativity. Every day I have to accept that I have no control over creativity, my mind and my perspective as a writer, or what may come of all this.
It remains a terrifying thing to live by one's own intuitive powers and not follow any particular standard or societal plan. Everything I am and do, everything I dream is in direct contrast to what my family expects and respects. I am a challenge to their way of thinking, living. And yet, I do not find this fact liberating, but alienating. You would think that by now I'd have grown comfortable with the role of the outcast, but this is not so. I want nothing but closeness and connection with others. In this respect I will always be naïve and childlike.
So I travel lightly through circles, ripples, wheels within wheels, immersed in the very fibers of a word.
I would talk to Vivian about this, call her and bounce around some ideas, solutions, possible explanations, but she too is anchorless and together we'd be blown away by the winds. I would talk to Jackie but she is too concerned with the concrete, the linear.
Tonight I truly understand others' inability and unwillingness to change the way they think and live as I continue to struggle with my own artistic conversion.
I've always advocated motion and change, but no move has been as profound and challenging as my advancement as a writer. My entire life continues to take new shape. My views.
My identity.
On the outside I am watching television, eating grapes, brushing my hair, picking up stray articles of clothing off my bedroom floor. On the inside a different kind of living occurs- a churning, a constant overflowing, impossibilities dilapidating. The more I acknowledge my contradictions, my many personalities, the more integrated my writing becomes, and words just fall into place, ideas flourish, sentences spring from the page.
Mother limps about the house, through life, downtrodden. Jackie and I hold our breath as if exhaling would unleash a slew of complaints and charges.
Sensing patterns developing within myself, dangerous ruts.
Paranoia, fear, suspicion, mistrust. Rust.
I imagine that my mother must feel like a street beggar. In her forties she learns she owns nothing, no property, no identity, her husband does not love her, her children do not need her, in fact she is dependent on those she resents. She throws herself at life and begs for a hint of devotion, some semblance of hope that she will be taken care of; a tender promise of change, but life does not, cannot respond according to our desires. And life- the father of her children- sweeps her aside and keeps other, less impending appointments. Left to the silence of her own chaos, fending off loneliness, guilt, resentment, and terror, she wipes her tears to discover she has been bruised and fractured from having thrown herself at an obstinate wall. Tragically, she is too conditioned, victimized, made obsequious by her own mother, religion, and community to realize there is another way of being and living.
The shark must remain in motion so as not to drown. Shiftlessness is suicide.
Blue.
Emotional cannibalism.
Child's impressions fade.
In talking myself out of phobias I discover precious ironies.
Leaves acquire orange hues, yellows, mauve.
For an instant I imagine love, sex, constancy and marriage with a single faceless, nameless husband.
I pray that I never discover in Jackie an insensitive aunt.
I miss my brother Bell.
A perfect spider web gleams in the morning light like a diaphanous dreamcatcher.
Someone's been in my room. A book has been moved, clothes washed, pants neatly hung. The number one suspect? Mom, of course.
I compare and weigh and speculate and praise and condemn and dream and fall and recover and forgive.
I question my sanity but fast twist out of the fetters of superstition and ignorance.
It is not imagination I ought to fear. In fact, I ought not fear anything.
On mellow bus to Sleep Café I come to associate stubble with vagrancy, ten-speed excursions, state-hopping! A man tells me candidly that he's just spent the night in the jailhouse and doesn't exactly know why, but that riding from Oregon to California was an adventure of a lifetime!
And I wonder here what exactly differentiates an acquaintance from a family member? How will I know a stranger from a sibling when often the emotional crimes of the latter far exceed the candor of the former?
From my parents' loveless marriage I learned to war. But I will fight the belligerence in myself, tear into my own flesh, wrap my bloodied fingers around the rage, the habit to rage, and rip it out, tear it out and dispose of it in the sea.
It is normal to resent. I am not a failure when I resent others, resent entirely, resent so perfectly, so dynamically it throws me well off balance and I stumble into doorframes.
I wake in the village of set patterns.
In the village of set patterns there is always hope of liberation, revolution. They buried the seed deep, deep. But it has not choked, nor died. The seed of improvement burgeons despite the depth and the darkness of No-You-Can't!
I weep against stone wall, by liquid stream.
I think of Nardin and he appears at the grill that same afternoon. Shining smiling eyes, trim masculine mustache, big tan arms, salt and pepper hair, and a lascivious confession. He tells me he loves to perform cunnilingus and can't get enough of it, loves the taste, loves to pleasure the woman. He asks if I've ever eaten pussy. I shake my head no. He continues to tell me about his experiences with women he calls amazing, fun, sexy, and intelligent. Not the victims we assume women to be, especially in relation to men like Nardin- ardent and virile. The women crave him, call on him, share him, accepting the lapsing nature of their union with him. He fools no one, especially not himself, with lofty notions that sex ought to be avoided, veiled behind marriage and reproduction. So, a man can after all be promiscuous, and simultaneously honorable.
He says in Assyrian that I am a thing to be bitten, and squeezes me emphatically.
Caesar returns from Mexico and begins working with us. He is George's hope, his favorite. Caesar can do anything, works hard, and is trustworthy. At closing time he climbs up on the grill to clean the oil-stained vents. I tell him to be careful.
'If you fall into the grill we'll have to make kebobs out of you,' I joke.
"Then you can eat me," Caesar says in his charming way of speaking, smiling, eyes shining.
'Only with a lot of pepper,' I blurt out, breaking a promise to myself not to flirt. Thinking to myself: Well, he started it!
He says I have beautiful hair. I thank him and turn away.
I'm hornier than I'd care to admit.
At work I can't help but overhear a conversation between a young mother and her little boy and am moved by the tenderness in their relationship. I admire the mother and innocently envy the little boy.
Repose of tempers, decrescendo of heated hearts, quiet aftermath in the collision of personalities. Here one hears souls suffering, as if suffering is breathing. Arduous breaths taken through words, charges, insults. Small battles fought (with mom) just to establish (my) individuality. Because of learned behavior what I want to say and do are always in contrast with what actually transpires. I think love, and instead rage manifests. I think love, and instead accusations manifest. I think love, and instead darkness falls against the light in the room. I think love, but something entirely different expresses itself through me. My body awkwardly jerks out that which I think with grace and logic. Action is a direct distortion of emotions. Until I learn to align my intentions and my actions I will fail to write genuinely and with originality.
Must allow my love- my LOVE- to break through my own barriers and limitations, as well as mother's vast impasses.
Memories charm me. I live on a healthy diet of colorful recollections. I am sustained by yesterday's reverberations. You'll find me tapping my fingers to them. I am propelled by the moment through the hours. Hours which slip into this diary like music that only I can hear…
I am so angry! There is so much to be angry about. Just living, just existence alone is reason to rage. There is so much to be indignant about. And in my present state of mind it feels as though the anger itself originates, grows, and persists from no one particular source, but is universal, prodigious, destructive. Here, in the eye of my own rage, I cannot think of one reason or cause. I guess I am hesitant to admit that this great fury is really directed at myself- my impulses, my ego, my selfishness, my superficiality, my cowardice, unoriginality, neuroticism, pretenses, laziness, and failures! My deep inability to overcome my fears no matter how small, how petty the fear.
I live in a passive world of dreams. I am growing older, becoming a "man" without self-reliance, confidence, financial security. What more must I sacrifice to get along in this world?
Each day I want more and more to withdraw from the world.
My master status remains: Human.
This is the diary of an androgyne.
Desire and lust keep me from grace. I will deflect from lascivious motives.
I search, scramble, and dig but find no guarantee that I will be distinguished as a writer. Such moments, fruitless, are highly depressing.
Once more my sleep is disrupted by a strange apparition. I open my eyes in the night to find an unusually large insect crawling on my blanket, and am startled. I throw the blanket asunder and switch on the light. By now I know there won't be anything there, that this is yet another unsettling episode. Nonetheless, I check my room for this grotesque ghost of an insect.
Although my stay here is temporary and although my future remains as uncertain as ever, I am extremely happy. I'm getting a taste of the calm life, normal by appearance. Yet, none of this is mine. I continue to desire the confidence of a rooted person. Even here I am a stranger and do not belong. I walk on disappearing ground. My dreams of constancy are built on slabs of diaphanous marble.
Have no choice but to lose fear and gain strength.
Mother tells me grim family secrets that reveal a darker side to people I otherwise respect and look up to. She changes people, the past, and my own perspective on things. Mother is injured, I can tell. I know she is under a great deal of emotional strain, but can't help but hear the words that trail from her lips like broken pieces of something already broken, broken, broken… Naturally, when I happen upon something that is broken and I do not know how to fix it I lose trust, become stone hard, but not numb. I feel. I feel. I feel. I feel that to have felt any sense of joy and hope was foolish. Illusions I gave a voice, sentences, words, adjectives, dialogue, texture, color, syllables, life.
One thing remains certain in all the uncertain exchanges: I will write. My love may fail, my hope may fade, my beauty may shatter, but no one can take my writing from me.
Is mother to be heard and believed? She reveals such a hostile and criminal view of the family. She sits me down and places before me a rogue's gallery of faces I love.
'Let it go,' I beg of her.
But I know she is incapable of forgiveness. Her grudge is the most powerful tool she has. It's her only hope.
I want to scream as another ideal is questioned. I have to trust that Jackie and Mom-Suzie are not criminal, nor angels. They are merely human and this is life, human nature. Perhaps they did lie, are selfish, conniving. But don't we all? Aren't we all?
Sorrow is the bridge connecting mother's whispers to mine. Though we may each whisper a different tale. I hate this connection.
Still, I levitate. Still I float just above permanence. None of this is mine. I may fill empty picture frames with photographs of those whom I love and miss, line up the books on the floor along the wall, hang my clothes in the closet, vacuum, but I cannot believe this house is my home, this bay, this country, or humanity.
One morning I beg mother, implore her, even inculcate her to stop this resistance that will ultimately kill her.
'I can't love you in this condition. I can't do it!'
It's true, in pity it is difficult to love.
I admit that because she has given up on forgiveness and on joy that I in turn am beginning to give up on her.
We do not face each other. She stands with her back to me. I stand with my back against hope.
I break a pattern. I speak smartly, clearly, calmly.
Even when she says again that she has come to live here for my sake I am calm.
'You've done me no favor. You unconsciously manipulate and punish us with your anger.'
I may be mistaken and out of line, but I am frank.
To leave, to run, to seek distraction in the outside world, the hills, the highways, to flee from the reds and the violets in the air. But some thing, some connection, a tenderness that still lives between the two of us turns me to face her. And the person I see standing there is not a woman in her forties, but a schoolgirl. A fragile, sad-eyed, pretty, pretty little girl- my mother. A lost, overcome girl with wild, mussy hair, looking abandoned, abused, neglected, wild, brought up to always falter with every step.
This sight breaks my tumult. I am overcome with a tenderness I have never felt for anyone, anything.
'I love you,' I say like I am admitting something deeply personal. Her eyes gleam like muddy lakes made of tears as she smiles. I continue, 'You're charming, you're beautiful, you're smart, and everyone loves you…'
At the bus stop, surrounded now by blues and greens as well as the occasional yellows and oranges of autumn, I have a distressing thought: What if all this is well out of her control? What if self-transformation, change, and reformation are actually out of some people's hands? What if some of us are beaten by life to the very point of living death?
On this beautiful autumn morning I lose a little more of myself, my innocence and idealism, to life, to grim, gray, stony, placid reality.
When I was a small boy in Iran my father was my hero. I couldn't wait for him to come home from work, and when he did I would run to him, detain him on the sofa and make him tell me stories from his own childhood in the village. Exciting stories about his adventures with his dog Findi, running about a natural landscape, happening upon foxes, snakes, streams, and fields.
Today my father calls and I can't wait to be off the line with him. We have the most perfunctory conversation. His voice reminds me of pain, not love. We have nothing to connect on.
Confidence, it seems, has the wingspan of a thousand swallows. Its flight as sporadic, as spasmodic!
These days it is increasingly difficult to tell if I've dreamt a thing, wished it, written it, or actually lived it.
Every sentiment, every resolution and conclusion appears concrete for a moment, but ultimately proves mercurial. This opinion too will change.
Funny this new need for continuity. I want to live in a continuous flow of life and experience, not break life down into day/night, yesterday/today, right/wrong. I am certain there are no resolutions to the human experience, no guarantees, no finish. Emotions remain finite, possibilities, experiences, thoughts, learning, love, even our darkness- all finite. Mercurial wishes, pulsating memories, the perpetual metamorphosis of perspective all remain hints as to the limitless flow of life and universe. Here I find my freedom to believe something other than what my family and culture have tried to force upon me, that I am as expansive and full of potential and possibility as my Creator, the universe…
I am living!
In art artists often share mediums. They are selfless, open, generous. Borderless! Musicians tell tales. Writers paint with words. Painters capture music. They meet in a space beyond the dimensions of living, despite material limitations. I hope to catch up with them- my tribe.