IT ALWAYS BEGINS WITH THE DESPERATION: ‘OH GOD!’ I cling to where it hurts like it is the first time, like never before. It is a toothache after it is fingers slammed in the sliding doors until it is the dogs sick and me on the phone and the moon, full and yellow for three nights straight, unable to be pictured clearly on my phone camera though each night I try. It is the grabbing at the bed sheets, the imagined fever, the end, nowhere safe, nowhere sacred. The roof caving in, the bolts come undone, like Dostoevsky: ‘if a house is falling upon you…’ (but without the rest) ‘one must feel a great longing to sit down, close one’s eyes, and wait’. I am brave in a way that appears inconsequential to others. In the quiet dark of my room, on the bed, facing the crumbling wall, listening with intent to its groans. Telling myself: if I don’t leave, there is always a way out.
‘I WAS ONCE SOMEBODY!’ I exclaim. A pitiful thing to say, where my dreams take me back to being 11, imagining I know what I know now. I am talking to myself in a mirror in my old primary school, saying, you got to go back, now do it right this time, do it all right. But someone asks me how old I am and I don’t know. Wherever I go I am stuck; the liminal persists even in the dreamscape. When I try and punch the glass it doesn’t shatter, and all I have is a book that means nothing to me.
I have become the type of person who can only talk about the same thing over and over. ‘The mourning never ends; the morning never comes.’ I am always forgetting what I’ve already lamented, and so I am mouth open in a constant howl to that yellow moon I cannot picture. Mum cuts my howls short when I do it to the dogs, it reminds her of Max. There’s my shame, for not thinking of him first.
And then, random bursts of hope in my notes app: ‘THERE IS JOY WAITING FOR YOU // ON THE OTHER SIDE’. It is in the flash of the wind in a solitary moment, that old feeling. Elsewhere, my wishlist:
- polka dot pjs
- intaglio charm
- carabiner
- silver sneakers
- spinning bookshelf
- a good grey ribbed tee
How easily it can all shift with a little money in my pocket. When everything is attainable, and I am not so weak. I’m the protagonist in Hamsun’s Hunger, scrolling through Etsy and looking around the crack on my screen at vintage gold charms that have messages inscribed on them to someone dead or gone in a different way. A miniature clock, a double deck of cards, a tiny ambulance with a ruby heart inside, a house that opens up to two hearts inside, engraved on the bottom: ‘for Annie, my home’.
My dad says he is going to change his surname, again, and maybe his first name too. Trade in the Hossein of his mother’s faith for the Nick of easy handshake introductions in Australia. I wonder where that leaves me and my brother, trailing after a second belonging that follows a lineage of only paperwork. But I am tired of telling these stories of dystopian immigrant living. I am too sentimental to write of the way ‘home’ all gets shaved off if you wait long enough.
More: ‘life is passing, a graze on the knee, and you are still looking back at the place that scraped it’. So what, things happened to you, just like everybody else. So what?You’re not so different. You’re not so alone.
My button up white shirts are patient for summer, hung up right next to my thick winter jumpers. I’m skipping spring completely, as always, cheating time.