The Day my Grandpa Died

Oh, I say. And go on about my day. 

It’s when I’m eating my breakfast, huddling close to the heater, that he’s brought up again as my sister and I laugh. Maybe I can skip class today, I say to her, tell them how devastated I am by the news, and it’s okay to say that because the grieving air is still hanging a million miles away, in a small city in Iran. It’ll take forever for it to fly over and reach us in Sydney, if it ever will. I can’t even remember the last time I saw him

Now, I only receive a photo of his bruised, dead body on a WhatsApp group chat where crying GIFs and emojis are being exchanged. We laugh about it, even though somewhere in the back of my mind I remember the stories my mum had told us years ago, of keeping her dad’s cancered and dead body on ice for days before letting go. 

I don’t skip class though. I find myself late as I always am and I wonder if he was always late too. I think of the stories that have repeatedly been told to me, the ones where my dad laughs as he tells me about beatings and burned skin, and the heavy quietness he holds, the fact that I’ve never seen him cry or scream or express anything more than a silent fury that makes my blood run cold. Perhaps it’s the only inheritance left by his dad, other than the land and money that is made worthless by the concrete borders surrounding it. 

Later, when the countless calls from near strangers and the condolences and funerals have come to pass, I forget about him. 

""مامانی

The first time I see art is in مامانی (grandmother’s) warm kitchen, watching as her hands dance expertly around the stage of the kitchen counter, fingers poised around knives and vegetables. But today I have been given the special treatment of joining her as we make فرنی; starchy and sugary goodness in the form of a pudding that causes chimes to ring through my six-year-old brain. 

As I sloppily stir the sweet, white mixture in a bowl, she talks of her wedding day, when she had been served the same pudding. She smiles fondly as she recounts how, at 14 years old, she was dressed in white and adorned with so much heavy gold around her neck that it had left marks for days. 

I dip my fingers into the bowl and lick the mixture from them, but she doesn’t notice, nor does she scorn me. Instead, her eyes glint as she chuckles and tells me that she had brought her dolls to bed with her the night of her wedding. 

I don’t understand that I shouldn’t have laughed at that yet. Maybe that doesn’t come until later when I’m twelve years old, standing over white porcelain, looking curiously over the remnants of my childhood spread in between my legs in the shade of pain. Or maybe it happens in the first instance of the many to come, when my eyes are glazed over and I run the same mantra over and over in my head, in a room, somewhere far away from where I want to be. Even then, I don’t understand. Not fully. 

There comes a day in مامانی (grandmother’s) warm kitchen, as her hands dance just like the twirling ghosts of her mother and her mother’s mother and all the mothers that danced with swollen and blistered feet to bring her there. 

You stand, much older now, with the knowledge that the kitchen is the only birthright of a mother, other than the unending handfuls of pain that are stifled in quiet laughs and sighs. So, when she grabs the scolding hot pan out of the oven with her bare hands, without even so much as a flinch, you ask her how? and she’ll know you’ll one day be standing in another warm kitchen, grabbing scolding hot pans with bare hands over and over again.

“A letter to an old friend,”

I write this to you in disdain, as there is nothing I find more humiliating than my own desires, but I write it anyways as it’s long past overdue. I sit, wrapped in blankets, fingers clicking and clacking, eyes feeling heavy, as I beg the air to cure me. 

I apologise as I struggle to fully recall our first meeting. I have a distant memory of the back of my dad’s car, as the blurring lights outside the window made my head hurt, I sat there and contemplated God. My sister, among many others, had warned me against this, and the advice had always been to cease thinking about such things, as it would slowly riddle your brain with a madness that was found unattractive. But my mind wandered, and I knew that he could hear all my thoughts, could see through me like I was an orange being cut in half, ready for his consumption. It scared me. 

Now, I realise perhaps it was you that I had truly seen for the first time. My only witness, my one true companion, my God. 

I write this as my shoulders creak with the weight of my mothers standing on them, so excuse the heaviness in the air as you breathe it in. 

And the truth is I write this with the simple desire to give you my love. The walls close in, all the lights dim, and all the noise retreats into the depths of the earth, and I miss you. 

I miss you and I miss writing in pencil. I miss sucking on the tips of my red ones, like a starved infant, until it stained my lips and I felt like a pretty lady. 

I miss you and you miss home. The smell of chlorine that made your stomach twist and turn, the scent of familiar perfumes that did the same, the barometric pressure of urine that you had kept and nursed inside you like a child, safe from seeing the horrors of cold porcelain. Looking back on it now, perhaps everything made you feel sick on the inside, aware of your strange geography. The tides of nausea bubbling up and down with every movement of the earth. 

Until you felt so sick that you cried to your mother on a night she won’t remember, on a bed that was not meant for four but it made do, and as she looked at you with heavy lidded eyes, you knew she was still in her trance, and so you confessed. You cried in her arms, hiding under the covers from your God, and begged the air to cure you. 

The next morning was the same as any.