October 25th, 2006

Last night he dreamt that the palace of Versailles was full of percussion instruments.

October 15, 2006

I like to think that one day I’ll be able to laugh and tell my mom all these things I’ve kept from her, and that on that day she’ll laugh also and we’ll be amazed at how ridiculous we once were.

October 5, 2006

“This love is an artery-clogging, heart-attack-inducing love,” he says. “You’re like a saturated fat.”

September 25th, 2006

Jan has a pretty bad slouch, and he’s losing us. He says that you could easily compare Coney Island to the Vatican – both are places of spectacle, both require the suspension of disbelief.

September 13, 2006

In the June of 1989, my cousin and I claimed the abandoned half of my grandparents’ duplex in Esfahan. Stain-glassed and fully furnished, it was the perfect place for us to be restaurateurs, puppeteers, a married couple, art gallery curators, and on especially sticky days, arctic explorers. We pushed our stories and our borrowed identities into every room of the house – the balconies were tearooms, the three-story atrium was a winter forest full of finches.

In the June of 1989, when the mourners turned the corner and poured into our street like black floodwater, my cousin and I watched from the third-floor balcony, trying to hide behind the tangles of abandoned laundry lines. The wail of the flood was raw and primitive, endless and unlike anything we’d ever heard before. Terrified, we knew that we had to do everything we could to save our games from paralysis - we shut all the balcony doors, we hid behind the sofas in the living room, we pretended we were four-legged animals hiding in the long gold grass of some faraway savannah.

September 11, 2006

I am a red persimmon, you scoop out my insides.

September 9, 2006:
The Possibilities

And maybe I’m full of tinsel,
silver strings hanging on the arms of every rib inside me,
even the awkward floating ribs
that the sternum refuses to associate with.

Or possibly roman candles,
their halos sighing each time my lungs deflate,
startling the snow geese as they migrate
from my left atrium into my left ventricle.

Or maybe my organs are filled with helium,
and that’s what makes my chest feel so crowded,
all these fidgety fruits trying to move upward and outward,
without density, without gravity.

August 27, 2006

Chris says that if we could draw physical diagrams of people’s conversations, then awkward conversations would have the most potential energy. To him, everything is a diagram, a definition, a delineation.

He finally runs out of glue and graphing paper around four-thirty in the morning. When he’s almost asleep, his shoulders are the sand dunes of some freckled desert where long-necked animals wander on trembling legs, exhausted and thirsty and catalogued, but still grateful for the ground that holds them up.

August 4, 2006

He makes the rosewood sound like an avalanche, like coins being thrown into Fontana di Trevi, like we’re wishing to one day return to this place.

August 3, 2006

I pick him up in front of the hospital and when I say “happy birthday,” he shrugs it off like any self-respecting sixteen-year-old boy would. While I drive, he tells me about how one of the doctors let him watch a surgery and how he “stood there and watched ovarian cancer for an hour and a half.” “You mean you watched ovarian cancer surgery,” I correct him. “That’s what I meant.” He’s still young enough to accidentally omit entire words from his sentences. And I know for a fact that when he writes, he constantly forgets to close parenthesis, creating sentences that have the consistency of honey.

August 2, 2006:
The Whole Mess of Why

In her fourth life,
my mom is a first-rate nervous wreck,
having barely survived diphtheria when she was three
(in a panic, her mom gave the pharmacist her gold earrings
in exchange for medication),
being run over by a moving truck when she was four
(the neighbors spilled into the street like wedding rice),
and drowning in a whirlpool in the Khalavarjan River by age nine
(a bystander dragged her out of the water,
his wet clothes suckering onto his skin like a lover).

She insists that everything
(teflon-coated frying pans, swimming pool water, Red 40 food coloring)
will either give you cancer or skin rashes or head colds,

and she makes her nightly rounds at 2am and 4am,
triple-checking window locks and making sure
our feet aren’t sticking out from under our blankets.

In her fourth life,
I don’t know if my mom considers herself cursed or charmed,
I don’t know that she even things about it in those terms.

August 1, 2006

I’m spending most of the second half of summer at my parents’ house, taking a math class at a community-college nearby, a place where I used to take summer swimming classes when I was little. When I was eight, they made me dive off the tallest diving board there, and I remember I was convinced that I would break all the bones in my body when I hit the water.

Today, during our mid-morning break from class, I wandered down to the swimming pool to see if the diving board was still there. It was, but barely, and I stared at it with my mouth open, running calculations and estimations in my head. It was maybe twelve or fourteen feet tall and so pitiful looking that I couldn’t understand how, when I was eight, it had seemed like I was jumping off a monster’s clavicles. My theory is this: diving boards have shorter life expectancies than childhood - after fourteen or so years, they begin to lose weight and hunch forward, they become freckled with rust.

July 28, 2006

While my brother and I are swimming at dusk, my mom sits on a metal deckchair and examines fabric swatches. “My clients are ruining my life with their bad taste,” she sighs, and holds up two silk rectangles for us to see. “These two together?”

She’s trying to salvage a movie producer’s master bedroom that, judging from the photographs, seems to have been neglected since 1987. The teal bed frame looks like it could exist in its own alternate reality. When mom shows us photos of the room’s calamine-lotion-colored walls, my brother and I look devastated, we sigh almost as loudly as she does. We’ve become invested in this stalemate with the horrible bedroom.

After dinner, I sit at the dining room table and pull apart polynomials, stretching them out like taffy. My mom comes and goes, holding up fistfuls of paint samples, diagrams of window treatments, pictures of Italian wall lighting that she’s cut out from catalogues. “And these?”

July 20, 2006

Professor Tishler speaks with a lisp and sweats Rorschach blots onto his polo shirts while he paces at the front of the room. His beard has been sharply trimmed in an attempt to create an illusory jaw-line, and he might have been blonde once, but it’s hard to tell now. He refers to what he’s teaching us as “the calculus,” which makes me want to punch him every time he says it, and I feel like I’m sixteen all over again.

July 19, 2006

My brother sunburned his back at the beach and has refused to put on a shirt for the past two days. He just walks around in pajama bottoms, moving gingerly from room to room and only sitting on backless chairs. Around three o’clock, he wanders into the kitchen, shirtless and slow. He’s drawn a grid on his stomach with ballpoint pen, blueprints for where he wishes he had actual shadows and indentations.

July 2, 2006

The sparklers burned tiny holes in the patio furniture cushions. I don’t want this summer to be a frame around the thought of last summer.

June 25, 2006

In trying to find the perfect color for the living room walls, my mom has applied a half-dozen different shades of off-white to the walls in stripes and amorphous splotches. Now, just like the rest of us, the living room has uneven summer tan-lines. The swatches have names like “Ivory Coast” and “Oatmeal,” names that make it seem like we lead far more delicate lives than we actually do.

June 16, 2006

Arun calls me while I’m in the grocery store. “You and I have the same problem,” he tells me. “We have all these ridiculous ideas about the way we want people to be,” I finish his thought, putting three apricots in a plastic bag. He’s with me for frozen foods, then cereals, dairy, and the checkout line. Sometimes when I’m talking to him, he refers to where I am as the “left coast,” which I love, because it sounds like the distance between here and Brooklyn is an arm’s-span.

May 4, 2006

My favorite thing about Pinecrest Elementary was the gigantic fiberglass jack-o-lantern they had in the corner of the playground. It was the size of a car. From the outside it looked marvelous and exciting, but once you crawled inside it, there was nothing to do but sit and examine the stringy fiberglass walls, or watch the kids playing outside, framed by three triangles and a crescent moon.

March 15, 2006

Siena was like a room with a fan-shaped seashell in the middle of it. Nicole and I sat in one of the folds of the gigantic shell and watched a group of middle-aged tourists play Red Rover among the pigeons. The tourists were slow-moving and all smiles, the pigeons couldn’t understand what was happening.

March 1, 2006

Yesterday I found him in the folder of all the accident photos, a swooning reflection in the rear window of the Toyota.

January 18, 2006:
Here are the Things that are ours so Far

We take what we can get:

The taxidermied mammals of North America.
A piece of beryl that’s the color of my parents’ swimming pool
on the fourth of July.
A surprised megamouth shark in a tank full of yellowing formaldehyde.

“Look at the size of that mouth. We could fit you in there,”
the man next to us says to his little girl,
lifting her up so she can see the hungry thing.

In the morning, I peel my body from yours.
Your back is all scapulae and buttons and birthmarks,
amateur cartography, your natural history.