He has your father’s lips.
Does he? I think he has baba’s hands. Feminine and dreamy.
“You are right.” You let out a long sigh.
Why is it that the moment words leave your mouth, they are already true?
Maybe it’s best to remain quiet. Or talk about inconsequential things like the weather or politics. Or what we had for lunch. I tell him my dreams from the nights before. Sometimes I talk about you. How you appear at the most unexpected times and in those moments, no time has passed since you were alive. Last night, you rode into my dream in a roller coaster car. Your cheeks were red and your hair wind swept, but above all you had life bursting through your eyes. And in that brief gap between the drop and the climb up, from the stillness where the excitement of past exhales before filling its lungs with the anticipation of the future, you urged me, “Enjoy yourself, Ladan. Life is short. Enjoy yourself.” And then you were gone.
I don’t care about your past. I don’t care about a time when your hair was fuller, your body younger and your escapades with the woman who now sits across the room staring at you. You begin with me.
I look again and again for an opening to climb inside you. I had found one in the beginning. While you were curious. While you were unguarded. While your desire overtook your reason. Before you remembered it hurt so very much the last time that opening was emptied of what you once allowed to fill it.
Maybe you should keep some things to yourself, you say. He doesn’t need to know everything, you say.
These days I think about how much you endured. How many thoughts remained inside you without finding their way out. The tempests that ravaged your body for as long as I can remember. Why didn’t anyone notice your unhappiness? Or did they and ignored it? They took you to doctors, I know. All the way to Amrika, I know. And that grey-haired man at the University who examined your swollen neck said to you: You have to let it out. All of it. Cry, my dear. Cry. And SAY what you have to SAY. Spill everything out. Whatever you do, don’t hold it inside.