February 1999

I continue to desire complete freedom from the emotional fetters, the disheartening reminders, the broken, rusted anchors that dangle and trail in the fog of me like too many yesterdays. I want to burn my clothes, break the clocks, tear up the photographs, erase the words off every page, take poison, and start over!
Where has the beauty gone?
By continuing to write, by poeticizing my experience I arrive closer to a thing called acceptance. I come to feel a little better when I've written: My madness is a blossom growing to encompass and overwhelm itself with its own beauty. There's no doubt about it. I don't just write the sentences, I imagine them, feel and envision them. I can actually see the slow and deliberate movements of the petals, each turning, unfolding, expanding, and joining its velvety kin in a resplendent spectacle of bright color, texture, perfume, and emotion!
No death remains final. I watch for the resurrections, feel for rebirths, wait for the inevitable gift that leads to a newborn world, vision, mood, and lesson.
Paper is a miracle. Ink a blessing. With communication becoming increasingly electronic I choose the handwritten medium. I seek the tangible. Artifacts I can touch.
The sky is tumultuous. Clouds of disparate shades and texture vie for dominance above the house; a struggle that remains unresolved, the continuance of which results ultimately in hail!
He does not know anything, nor trust anything he knows.
All impressions and resolutions, all convictions and relationships are fickle and ephemeral. Only the tangible things remain dependable; a chair is a chair, a desk a desk, a tarnished mirror forever the tarnished mirror. The only dubious feature about an old creaky chair is the human figure easing into it.
He drifts on sea-blanched artifacts.
Drifting out, further out. Surrounded only and permanently by an undulating blue, but even here upon familiar sighing swells he learns that this conviction of no convictions upon which he sails- though buoyant and unsinkable- is most desperately not dirigible. He may place his weight this way and that, fixate all his memory and energy into a new horizon, but none of this may change the direction of his aimless wanderings upon, into, through, and away on blue, blue, blue…
So he resolves to sink the steadfast conviction and drown himself beneath the fearsome surface.
And escape wakefulness.
He does not understand why he continues to snap impatiently at his own mother, why he punishes her and what for. He is cold toward her and shrugs his shoulders and walks away, into the hall, to his room, between walls where he wants to forgive her, forgive her, forgive her, but for what!
He has forgotten.
Driftwood…
He strains to make poetic the sadness that fills the sea, giving it its pigment, its iridescence, its mercurial blueness. Only through these phrases can he meet the flickering phases of acceptance that like poetry are bewitching, harmonious, vivid, articulate, empowered!
Language.
Languish.
A wish for language.
It was during the final months and weeks of his parents' divorce that he had the idea to invent his own language; a secret language with which he could commune and communicate with his life, which he did not understand. Amidst the wreckage of his puberty he would build his own alphabet, fashion the incipient words from exhilarating new syllables. He would compose the sound and music of it, be the curator of the ambience, romance, and mystery of it- this personal language no one knew or would take from him as they did the familiar things.
From this feverish wish to possess something that would be entirely his own, a dialogue by and with himself, was born his diary- an intimate dictionary and emotional thesaurus of his own, a map back to himself in a jungle of thoughts without roots, the pages of which are made of lace with words painstakingly stitched out of zephyr…
He always desired a language far more his own, more his own than his first- which he had not chosen, the one given to him like a name, or a genetic flaw; nor his second, which he had learned simply because he had happened to be born in Iran. And English? English was everyone's language, and ironically it would feel closer to his fingertips- and to make it his own and to feel at home in it he had had to wrap his fingers around it and never let go as he'd moved his hand over the pages like they were a Ouija board. What would the English alphabet reveal next about him that might tie his loose ends so that he would not drift completely away into blue oblivion…
And yet a deeper language strives to connect us all- one that does not pine for interpretation, is not linked to one race or nation, but remains global, if not universal; a language that is not sexist nor elitist and eloquently communicates our overarching need for peace without the imminent threat of nuclear warfare.
The language of life.
Shammi tells him of a practicing therapist she has located in San Francisco who is a woman and Assyrian!
'Is she gay?' he asks with wonder.
"I don't know. I hope she's at least gay-friendly!"
They marvel at the prospect of unburdening themselves with a therapist who might truly understand what it might mean to have been brought up in an Assyrian household.
"Can you imagine speaking Assyrian to one's therapist!"
To be unable to unconsciously hide or distance oneself by means of semantics…
He spends an entire afternoon with his aunt Jackie with whom there is always hilarity and boundless laughter, as well as ardent conversations about their history as a family- mostly in an attempt to understand the many rifts that continue to plague Jackie who struggles to be the glue that binds the family.
That evening they end up at dinner at a reputable restaurant in Marin where they playfully conspire to keep their frivolous money spending a secret from both their mothers, who would surely disapprove of their unmindful afternoon. They sit at a small table to the right of a great fireplace from which warm, yellow light dances on their faces. They are more like adult siblings or close friends than nephew and aunt. Occasionally they slip from English into Assyrian- usually when they are commenting about someone's dress or noting a handsome man. They laugh wholeheartedly but discreetly, holding the guffaws in, their giggles low, turning red, anything but to draw attention to themselves. But people always notice them anyway, even if obliquely through reflections in mirrors, because they are exotic in Marin, especially together.
He continues to marvel at their relationship and celebrates the manner in which it seems to grow daily, soulfully, and lovingly.
It's hard to imagine that he was once only a small boy and she a mere girl seven years his senior, dominating him, tickling and teasing him, pinching his cheeks and placing painful kisses on them.
But that was a long time ago and very much has happened since then. So much has changed.
He happens upon a talisman and the day comes to feel promising. He wants not only to preserve this symbol of optimism, this sanguine mood, but to cultivate it, strengthen and duplicate it so that he may administer it to anyone who may be in need of a same balsam.
In Jordan a king dies.
In Marin a young man's heart breaks for his father, long distance on the telephone.
At the restaurant he notices that one of the patrons seated at his table #35 is Griffin Dunne, and while he cannot think of the actor's name he ventures to say lightheartedly, 'Aren't you an actor?'
All the faces at the table light up and the man seated nearest Emil grabs his arm and says excitedly, "Yes, he is! You recognize him."
'Of course I do. He was in that wonderful film in which all sorts of crazy things happen to him in the course of a single night… "After Hours".'
The actor himself smiles warmly and nods his head gracefully.
'Well, you look great!'
Everyone at the table laughs while Dunne himself looks quietly pleased.
Although he walks away from this interchange smiling to himself, he remains in so many ways disheartened as one of his most cherished relationships continues to dilapidate. Its ongoing death leaves an undeniable mark on the white satin sleeve of his heart. Quietly he accepts that he must let Anna go, and that all deaths should occur naturally.
As do rebirths.
The same child who was once particular, fussy, and fastidious, the one who walked along walls and furniture deliberately so as not to brush against them and disturb his clothes and mar his skin, the meticulous child who spent long childhood minutes before the glass door of the stove and made sure every single hair was perfectly in place, now seeks the antithesis of perfection; a painful freedom from his stringent world. He kisses a stranger he can barely see in the dark while another kneels against the black floor and wraps his warm mouth around his erection. Someone else strokes his hair. Another shoves his tongue inside his lips. Yet another enters the dark cubicle and offers his penis, the head of which is swollen and soft.
Friends of his mother had advised her to take the child to the doctor for his obsession with perfection and cleanliness.
He welcomes the men because he knows from every human contact and interaction comes the antidote that might cure him of the fetters that entangle him in a web of isolation and suffering.
Sex remains his poison-cure.
Shame a pathway to freedom.
Jackie leans against the frame of the door to his room, sighs as if with frustration, and asks how it is that he be so prodigiously disenchanted with life and love at such a young age? He had not expected the question and searches his memory for an answer, but comes up empty. What would he tell her, anyway? The truth? She would never understand. And although he feels closer to her than ever, feeling a surge of love even as she stands with her arms casually crossed, her face soft and searching, he would have to edit his story, clean it up considerably, censor, purify, and abridge. Surely the essence of their dialogue would be lost behind the doctored words, the strained politeness, the punctilious choice of expressions.
In short, he'd have to lie.
He limps through the days like a man who has been shot, and carries himself thus across the dream that is built on plywood foundations, fastened with plastic conviction.
He wants more than anything to erase the blood from his memory and restless wings, and take flight from this absent god called art. But the blood is too thick, too red, weighs his wings like early frost on crestfallen crops of a last harvest.
Instead he weathers a storm of emotions by sporting a smile that is fresh, winning, and histrionic.
He does not like the person he is becoming and catches an unexpected glimpse of this burgeoning counterpart whose expression is blanched, and whose gesticulations are grotesque like those of a corpse animated by jolts of electric shock… graceless spasms of hope…
Then repose.
More than that. Liberation.
Is hope the byproduct of electric impulses choosing to communicate again, severed cells reuniting, haphazard nerves reconnecting? Or is it purely a metaphysical happenstance?
He goes to Marin's one gay bar in San Rafael. He crosses the parking lot in the dark, steps purposely in rain puddles, pushes the bar's glass door open and steps in, wondering if men can coexist as lovers.
The bar itself is large, the dance floor empty like an expansive desert without life, mirrors reflecting only colored lights; no moving, breathing, pulsating bodies.
There are a handful of lonely-looking older men sitting at the bar. They seem to know one another; perhaps they are regulars. Every bar has them.
He sits somewhere near them and the bartender who is large and friendly serves him.
The other men have taken notice of the young stranger and seem to be surveying him from their barstools, sending his way their coquettish glances that take too long to pass, and tenacious smiles that like the lights from the dance floor are red, heavy.
They drink.
Richard whose face is blank, whose dark eyes are empty, admits that he battles depression, and is heavily medicated. The Assyrian, having been erroneously brought up to respect everyone when not everyone merits respect, smiles sheepishly as he swivels on his stool, away from Richard.
Talk of moods and emotions being trampled and contained by prescription medicines horrifies him. As much as he'd like to deny the similarities, he can't help but shudder that he should recognize the pattern of elevated days crashing into deflated, unending nights.
Alex is scant, ancient, but youthful, playful. He dances with the pool cue when he is playing with Brian who buys the drinks. Every once in a while Alex looks over at Emil, executes a light airy step, turns as if in a ball gown, and smiles.
After the game, he sits next to Emil and lets it be known that he is wealthy, telling grand tales of past trips to London, Rome, Paris- all the typical places. Alex's gestures are wispy and feminine, intoxicated and endearing.
Richard returns from having smoked a cigarette on the patio and sits on the other side of Emil, blatantly interrupting Alex, suggesting they go bowling some time, just the two of them.
Secretly the young man relishes the attention, sitting demurely in the middle of the two men, even if they are pitiful. He remains at the bar a while longer wanting to leave and wanting to stay, waiting for a reason for either.
Half asleep, half drunk, he sits at the computer when he gets home and proceeds to write… anything.
Chinese folk healers treated some ailments with the secretions they procured from a certain toad. This secretion they obtained by surrounding the toad with mirrors so as to startle it!
Similarly, his diary is a mirror in which he may catch a glimpse of his true self without the robes and veils of his social persona. In the diary a different image is developed from the negatives of life and living. And although this image may initially disturb and alarm him, in the long run it helps him see a more dynamic view of his experiences, which he hopes will heal him in ways no other person, or toad, could.
He marvels at the complexity of relationships with those nearest him. He searches for Good and for Bad, but unlike comic books and religion, real life does not possess or reveal definite villains or likely heroes. Only people. Real people. Friends. Family. Coworkers.