How it was sweet

I wake up. It’s a new day, I walk to the kitchen and among all the bustle, make myself coffee. I know when I start living by myself, this won’t be as simple. In an empty apartment, the coffee grinder will become my morning kiss. So I continue pouring as I take in the noise.

I sit down on the balcony with my mug and look out at the view. The view from this very balcony was different 10 years ago, I remind myself it will be very different 10 years from now. Once it was an empty land, today there is a house, tomorrow there will probably be a building. My life can be divided into the phases of this view. My innocence was the empty land, my first heart-break saw a house being built, and maybe years from now the girl who sees the building will have way more stories to tell. (And better puns)

“Breakfast is on the table” my father screams from inside. I walk towards the table fully aware of the fact that if I were to ever write about my family, it is this habit of eating every meal together that will be described in the introduction, probably in italics. I tell myself that maybe this is why we’re all so close, most families don’t eat every meal together. But in my house it is a strict rule. The eggs tasted a little sweeter after that thought.

After I finish, I go to my room to take a shower, I look into the mirror and frown at the fat on my hips and tummy. ‘It’s okay’ I tell myself. ‘Years from now, it is this moment that I will recall to connect with my teenage daughter.’ I’m sure there will come a day when she’ll try to put on a dress that won’t fit, I want to be standing behind her when she googles how to lose weight and remind her that I was that girl once too. Every insecurity of mine is making me closer to her, even though she isn’t around yet.

I walk into my mother’s room and she’s talking to my aunt, who also happens to be her college best friend. I watch her and wonder if this is what they were like when they were young. I’ll never truly see her as a young adult, but I smile at the fact that it is times like this that I get glimpses of it. Will this be me as a mother too? Will I only be able to offer glimpses of who I am today?

The house starts to smell of vinegar, as a child I never really understood this. I’d act like I was going to puke, hoping they’d spray a freshener. But it took some growing up to see how important vinegar was to my heritage. I imagine if I marry into a family alien to my culture, of its food. It is the smell of vinegar that will keep me from getting homesick. I tell myself if I ever do write about what being Parsi is all about, I will start with the concept of vinegar.

The play school opposite my house has a bell that rings at 1:30 every afternoon. The gates open and the parents pour in to pick up their children. I hear the bell and feel the same sense of excitement it use to give me when I was 5, we were made to stand with our class and wait for our pickup. There were some kids that were always taken first, some last. Then, I would feel this was a measure of parent’s love, today I understand a busy day. One day I will hear a bell and run into a play school to pick up a young boy that looks an awful lot like his father. In half an hour of the bell, the school is empty.

I sat on my bed and started to write, I wondered if years from now I’ll have to be sitting in front of a psychologist that’s reading my work, hoping Freud is right about hidden meanings or if I’ll be handing them over to some man hoping it reveals my rawest of sides.  I type away, the loss of the world around me when I start writing is my secret. I watch the walls around me fade, the voices become irrelevant and everything is blur. This is my space, I ask myself how I do this and also how long will I be able to. I think of I time, maybe when I’m 30 or maybe 40, when I sit down to type but the walls refuse to blur, the voices only get louder.

I distract myself.

I spent my first kiss thinking of how it will become a cliché for my youth. Hugging my grandmother was about the stories of her I will tell my grandchildren. Crying to a friend felt a lot like making a mental list of people who truly know me and laughing with my father always accompanied a silent prayer.

I’m always looking at the present with a sense of nostalgia. For the memory it could become. And like any addiction, I’m torn between the highs and lows of it . How Robert Browning puts it ‘How sad and bad and mad it was – but then, how it was sweet.