11:33 pm – Sunday, May 23, 2010
I am forcing myself to be something I am not. Something no one around me is, an anomaly of such eccentric sorts. Maybe I am not cut out for this, this writer shtick I have fabricated in my mind and led myself to believe I have the capabilities to execute. I have a drama-infested mind and I can never find the motivation to display the thoughts that shake and rattle my human emotions, upon paper with a pen, pencil or crayon even. I do not have a place where the current of my expressive terminology can find vivacity in its own refuge and where my imagination is not taken prisoner by my insecurities of never becoming a published writer. I wish I could refrain from stating the obvious every time I sit and embark upon a stream of consciousness, but the truth still resides heavily upon my process of infinite contemplation, I am not living in this very moment nor will I be in a second, minute or in an hour from now. I am not one of those children who had a dream of what they wished to become when they were to grow up and followed through with it. I chose to write a daydream that I had one day in 1997, during 3rd period math with Mrs. Silva, down on paper in the seventh grade and I guess I never stopped. This was not my dream. I am not medical school or law school bound. I am Neda, a side-effect of two people in their mid to late twenties entangled in a passionate surge of love-making. I was born C-section because I refused to come out into an impending, atrocious altercation against depression via my mother’s 28-year-old vagina. I should have been aborted, lost half way through the pregnancy, or strangled by the umbilical cord (if that even falls relative to a C-section procedure). Things would’ve been different. I would never have been open to the elements in-conjunction with parental viciousness, or bitter self-deprecation. To those who’ll see this as just a “fishing for compliments” scheme, they may calm down. I am not about to face pessimism and negatively approach this and say that I have nothing to offer to humankind, I am simply stating that I don’t know what it is and even if it breathes days alongside mine. How long must I fight against the sea of my father’s emotionless wave lengths approaching great heights? I hypothesize that his hands never held mine the day I was born, and if I am wrong then for how many hours, and did he ever look at me and realize what responsibilities were placed upon him that day. Bookends, Simon and Garfunkel said it best. It was a moment of innocence and naivety. A moment I shared with the man that was my biggest confidant. I must digress; I preserve his memory in a video photograph from 1987. We were eating lunch, my mother, my father, my uncle and I. I asked for some tomatoes and I needed a knife to cut them with. I was wearing my yellow sweater and a yellow barrette side-swiping my baby hairs to the left. An Ingénue before I was even 4-years-old. I asked for a paper knife and got up to get it from the kitchen and almost knocked the video camera over. In the stillness of nights, as I lie awake, I can still hear my father telling me to be careful just incase the camera should tumble over from its erect positioning and I would get hurt. He loved me. He never stated so, but as soothing as the sound of those wind chimes outside my grandparents home used to be, I just knew. My mother keeps saying that the past is the past, and that the future is a gift, therefore that is why they call it the present. Writing is all I know. Photographs are all I have left. The past is gone and so is the Neda whose father never hesitated to hug her.
Who knows what my childhood aspirations were, I don’t remember, I was too busy chasing that something for just one supplementary, diminutive flash in its company. Who knows what will become of me after I carry out yet another difficult feat and get my graduate degree in English writing. All I know, at this very moment, is either I listen to my mother, leave my heart vacant for the future and stop writing about my father, or I stop living the only way I know how.
