dear diary,

It happened again. Time travel, the road moving backward all around me. It was less frightening this time. I screamed a little, while driving. I screamed after I wept, and the screaming made me cough. And I just kept coughing and coughing. So I lied when I arrived. I said I couldn’t stop coughing because I was singing loudly in the car. The woman’s face lit up imagining so much joy.




dear diary,

Yesterday I saw a gun in a field of daffodils. Rusted and comical, it looked like the private parts of a dead man in the middle of the flowers. In linear time, what we call “the future,” I will see my father lying completely naked in a crowded emergency room hallway. I will pretend I don’t see him this way. And when the overworked nurses force a bedpan with strained cheer under his dehydrated body so he can poop in public, and the stench will flood every particle of air and every mask-wearing nurse and doctor will comment on how revolting it smells and I will pace the floor pretending I can’t hear them, there will be no flowers, no fields.




dear diary,

Even after the puppy pooped slowly, a thick spiral mound, on my son’s long-haired rug, and we both panicked, vectors scrambling our faces like hangers in our mouths, the dog fleeing from our yelling—even then, I laughed hysterically, hands holding my belly, joy leaking everywhere.

dear diary,

My father’s brain is softening. Like a child he says I want fried chicken, over and over. I am a child bawling loudly in the car. I call my father. A dust speck. In the dark. I am sad, he says, shaking. His head in the dark. My father asks me to pay his phone bill. My father’s car insurance company calls me. My father says when will I see you. Wednesday I say. Today is Monday I say. At the koi pond my father pulls out his phone. He takes shaky pictures. They are so beautiful, he says, smiling.





dear diary,

I found my father on the floor this morning. He kept asking, Did you just bring that couch in here? I called the paramedics and washed the poop from the floor. Here is a Sunday like any other. The dog panting for water. The squirrels watching me from gray trees as they eat.

dear diary,

My father’s mother is dead. My father’s father is dead. My father’s older brother is dead. My father’s younger brother is dead.




dear diary,

Today I asked my father if he wants his body to be burned. Such a strange question. It got stuck in my throat as I drove him and his walker to the social services building that used to be a mall. No fire, he said, no fire.

dear diary,

My father used to make me change my outfit every day before school because he said my clothes were too tight, too inappropriate. By the time I was in the seventh grade, I was wearing his sweatpants and t-shirts to school. 

My father grew up poor in Lorestan. He loved his mother. His mother worked and worked and worked until she died. When she died, my father was living in the US, and he couldn’t go back to Iran. That’s the only time I saw him cry. 





dear diary,

The whole world tilts, lifts an eyebrow in pain. We are absolute, unconventional, wet expressions. It was the nine year old me who sobbed loudest today as I poured my father’s urine and blood down the toilet. Yarrow and lavender, I chanted, a raft of stained glass. 





dear diary,

I’m lying naked in a drained tub reading entertainment news. This is freedom. 
I do not think: is my dad’s catheter bag full of piss? How much blood is in there?





dear diary,

My dad watches YouTube on his phone all day. He no longer reads, or writes. 
Today he shows me an AI video of a little girl and her mother standing in sunlight. The child holds a fruit in her hand, and she walks toward the viewer, and offers it. That’s the whole video. My father watches the video and thinks the child can see him, that she is actually trying to share her fruit with him.

She’s so kind, my dad says, full of feeling, always alone.

dear diary,
 
It’s true, I can be cruel. A crying, barbed thing, running over the toes of the elderly, punching imagined strangers in the face. I am tired, I keep repeating to my dad, while crying. He stares at me, layers and layers of powerlessness.
A new development in his dementia: he giggles when he feels overwhelmed. So here we are, my dad giggling so intensely he can’t speak, me crying and being mean. I am fifteen again. 
I must not extend this cruelty to my son who sings in the mornings. What am I always becoming? The pendulum arcing like a menacing clown’s mouth. 
Vibrating under the fake grass in my dad’s new patio is a thousand insects surviving. 
My son says he sees legs walking from one room to another when we are alone. Sometimes I obsess over protecting those I love.
Is my evolution all one indefinite purge? These are my hands, and this is my throat shedding itself onto the linoleum between us.





dear diary,

When I was seven, I told my father that I used to believe rain was the weeping of clouds. He said this is a beautiful poem. That day, he translated it to Farsi, handwrote it in a careful script, framed it, and hung it on the wall of our apartment.





dear diary,

My dad’s name is Rohollah. It means spirit of God. It’s also the first name of Ayatollah Khomeini, the guy who established and led the repressive Islamic Regime from which my parents fled. My dad remembers details from the revolution. He even remembers specifics from his childhood, like the color of a teacher’s hair, the heat in the south during the brief time he lived with his father, the look on an auntie’s face when she was being hit by her husband, the feeling of the brick in my dad’s hands when he hit the man in the back to protect her, before running. But he doesn’t remember that I visited him yesterday, that we ate together, and played games.

dear diary,

Today my son and I visit my dad, and we laugh and laugh as we play made-up games with objects we find in the room. I am trying my best with what I have been given. 





dear diary,

I remember feeling only stupid or worthy for years, wild in my dimness. Lonely as a balloon at a covid birthday. A shoeless haunt moved through me like home. 
I embrace my son, I face him, everything beautiful, especially blood clots on the rag between my thighs, rhododendron of dimension-slipping uterine power. I part my auric spine like mahogany doors, I release a string of stains. 

dear diary,

I’m leaving this here for my dad:

When he was better, more here, we would walk together to Jewel Lake—him, me, my son—and sometimes there would be a crane there, on the water, and my dad would point to it, delightedly, and we would all sit, the three of us eating our snacks, watching the bird barely move, everything simple expanding through us until we remembered easily and exactly who we are.