Nelly Furtado - Try

It never gets any easier. It does not fade away with the presence of new time, of a new love, or the loss of an old romance. I remember my time with him and I'll refuse ever a chance to forget it. The smiles were fulfilling, the fights left imprinted aches on my 19 year-old psyche. "That was you baby, this is me baby." All that we did was try, and that in itself was a triumphant feat. Thanks for having been the love of a certain time in my life.

Morning View

You were my reason for not allowing that rusty
blade to perpetuate its impurities upon my
flesh that summer when I turned seventeen, up
on that hill overlooking the horrid valley.
I wished you were there.

I remember driving down Topanga, listening to
Incubus and relishing in the beauty that was, and
remains, your ample comedic and handsome existence.
I’ve never written about you. The ambivalent yet loving
recollections of my father never allowed me to. At this moment, twenty-
six years of whirlwind-winter shackles no longer bind me and I
thank god for that.

I remember digging my sparkling-fuchsia painted toes in the tainted sand, cheering you on in your winning feat as not only Arapahoe High School’s essential quarterback but mine as well, as the freedom from any further bouts of the ironically-comforting deprecation, filling the non-physical element belonging to myself, was graciously granted in your presence.

I remember knocking back caramel fraps in that heat wave which left
our bronzed skin of desire to the fair eye, when we strolled through Third
Street and you bought me an indigenous-inspired anklet, after being star-
struck by Police Academy’s Mahoney. Only you, and your celebratory antics could make me giggle.

I remember the sting of sun-drenched summertime departing; another year of post-marked mail, non of it addressed to me. I, a sixteen-year-old lost in the imbalances of serotonin, sobbed silently in that car ride to the terminal where you said goodbye. I wore that beaded thread like a shield to protect me from the evils of high school and its epic, teenage life-affirming cliques. Because of you, I knew I belonged somewhere.

A decade has passed, tumultuous changes leaving us tested and
frightened. The captor of my youthful yesterdays had suffered two heart
attacks renouncing him a time-bomb waiting to go off at any swift, intangible instant. The mother who brought your matchless subsistence into my life, survived an incapacitating brain aneurysm. He lays comatose, brain dead in all emotions. She loves as she always did and has promise in living no matter the charismatic teeter-tottering of masked hurdles, and I thank god for that.

I always wanted another girl‘s
paradise, until you taught me how
to want my own. Thoughts of you lope through my
head, with powerful memories beyond measure nestled in my character.

I wish now, as I did then, that you were here.

Mi Familia

The Brady Bunch had nothing on The Khankhanian Klan. :)

My Mother's Mother

Here I sit in the outskirts of your paradise, my
fear, my head between my aging hands. I am nearly four annual-
filled miseries away from thirty, and I cannot
smoke these Marlboros fast enough to lay
deep within this lawn, entangled in
your see-through, vein-faced arms.

A year ago, about a leisurely moving quarter
past twelve in the ample, starlit morning, I fell
into a sweet, undisturbed, blue
laziness. A year ago, about an obdurate half
past twelve in the excruciatingly sunlit
afternoon, you blundered at the evening’s impending
moon, and prayed us a fond
valediction.

After my birth, I was diagnosed as emotionally
ill. During your life, I accepted the sentiment of being
rescued. After it, I was prescribed peace in the form of
a pill. I ruminate your essential complexion urgently
through my head; a sovereign foreigner, a human
chimney that could out smoke any man, a barbecuing chicken-
charcoal loving queen, and a powerful woman afflicted
by Alzheimer’s, Dementia, Emphysema, and Asthma.

A tattered snapshot of you, sending
me off to tap the sublime heights of indispensable
youth on a rubber seat, holding on for Crayola-
obsessed life manifested into chains, that reads Kodak in
grey type, housed in a teal-sparked, copper-
made skeleton, remains obligated to all the park
birthday parties you sumptuously hosted. The homeless
and I never went hungry.

You had clothed me in tender pride up until your final
lungful. You fed me Big Macs minus the thousand-
island dressing, bought me bouncing tie-dye balls, and acrylic
paint. I remember your laughter, the dearest
dose to a six-year-old’s despondency, as you’d make me
breakfasts of splendid glory to wake to.

Your body was exhausted of that phenomenally, godly
spirit on a Thursday morning. I now wake to
your license of vocal sound tapped out
at the hub. Frozen, green grape promises waft
through my conscience. Your remains reside in
thoughts of immortality, as the vision of your curls
doused in Alberto V05’s hot oil keep me afloat, while
spun out on your lingering nicotine.

Goodbye Grandma: Sept.10, 2009

It's 12:56 in the morning on September 11,2009, just 12 hours, give or take a
few, into my immortal's spirit having said goodbye to this still yet difficult place. Losing her was something inevitable, yes, but necessary, I claim undeniably false. Even after playing this moment in my mind over and over again, I never thought my worst nightmare would manifest itself into broad daylight anytime soon. I cannot dance with these devils and their significant faces without you.
I hold fast to the courage and force that you, as a mother, instilled within me, as the spirit that surrounds me here today evokes our countless escapades, and I smile reluctantly towards another, yet that flash of an uncreated memory is nowhere in sight and granted, away from my tangible grasp. I realize how lucky I am as your granddaughter to have been blessed with such a piece of divine perpetual bliss upon my childhood. From our Big Mac's minus the Thousand Island dressing, to your remote control freakouts, "Now put on some CNN instead of this Nickelodeon", from you incessantly kissing the policeman's hand that summer when we got pulled over, on the way to your fictitious Disneyland, to that day at the courthouse when you proclaimed you knew English, "but not exactly".
If only the man in the moon would transport me back in time for just another Saturday afternoon in your sweet care, if only....

I am reminded of the toughest moment in my life, as my parents' love fell apart, it
runs rampant in my frightened mind as I lay, trouble dreaming, while you twist, a young, tantalizing, beautiful gypsy in my heart. You were there that tumultuous summer when I lost what I knew to be home, and as the hours beat away in my mind, I wish I were there as your courageous fortitude drifted away and out of what had been home to you. Thank you for saving my life, listening to my fears, and calming my adolescent tears. I will forever remain indebted, and inebriated off the beauty you as a woman, kind and motherly, exemplified within these tarnished moments of my existence. I find it sacred and bittersweet; I was fighting such sadness, refusing to wake into the start of a brand new day, as you took your nap after polishing off what became your last meal. You exhaled into heaven, as I inhaled into living the first day of the rest of my life, without you, unknowingly.

You were the first sunflower that bloomed within my desolate garden that
summer when my mother got sick. You uncompromisingly drove me to the city of hope
that first day of 8th grade, and you, you were my city of hope those latter summer days in and autumn days out. I wonder if I ever returned the persistent favors you granted me, without question, back to you.

I recall being a sleepless child upon one of the many beds in your orphanage.
I remember the smell of your hair, blown out forming beautiful gold ringlets at the ends. I reminisce eating chelo-kabob in your walk-in closet with little Jessica in tow, during family gatherings. I reflect upon meeting you and grandpa at the Northridge mall that simple Saturday with my father, and having pizza for lunch. Oh, how much you loved my father. I thank you from the bottom of my heart for that alone.
I muse over your lavish black, sun-sparked golden dress at Sarah's bat mitzvah, and how mesmerized I was as an eight year old, the way it hung on your regal body...wishing I would grow to be as composed and unyielding as you.
I learn by heart where you would stash all your cigarettes, money, lipstick, and lighter...and no, it was not in a purse.
I keep in mind how you'd give me money on occasion and told me not to tell
grandpa...Sorry grandpa.
I'll never forget how I'd give you and grandpa tests to quiz your knowledge about
whatever the subject, and you'd always get A's, and we'd give grandpa F's to make you
laugh...
Your laugh, the right anecdote for any six-year-olds heartache.

I will never fail to hold on to your simplistic nature when I was in preschool...
you would ask me for directions to get me there on time, even though you knew where
you were going all the while.

If I could talk to you one last time, I'd ask, who else is to take pride in me as I
shoot for the stars? Who else is to drive aimlessly till we find some destination.. .maybe Vegas this time, or back to the meat market? Who else is to yell at grandpa because you sent him out to buy Pepsi and he came back home with a 12-pack of soda cans that had another woman on it (Princess Leah during The Star Wars Craze)...Who else?

Growing up, It was almost as if I only took breaths because it insured yet another
second in your arms. Grandma, I'll commit you to memory each and every time I look up, up at the heavens, and smile goodbye.

Chapter One: August 26, 2010

The classroom clock struck 2:45 pm. I looked over to my left and through the bungalow window spotted her pulling her lighter out of her breast's humble abode and lighting up her infamous Marlboro. She was wearing her black slacks, gold flats, and her hair was highlighted and done up in the style that Farrah Fawcett made famous in the 1970's.

The year was 1993; I was a fourth grader and was desperate to make new friends who would never leave "chia pet" jokes up to their imagination. My grandmother made her way upon school grounds instead of waiting in her car in the unloading children zone, and sat upon a wooden bench besides the handball courts, casually smoking her cigarette. All I thought was, "holy crap, my grandmother must be breaking the LAUSD's number one law...smoking in an institution that houses children 11 years and younger for 7 hours a day."

I was mortified and began praying silently to god in hopes that no one would see her foreign body, a slightly well speaker of english, and perhaps get me into trouble. Bless her heart and the many apprehensive minutes of my youth that have undoubtedly been attributed to her delicate, amorous, godly-like existence.

I have spent many nights during the past year, including the night she died, laying awake around half past two in the morning listening to Simon and Garfunkel's "Bookends". "Long ago it must be, I have a photograph. Preserve your memories, they're all that's left you." I have a photograph of her and my parents on my nightstand. My mother, a starlet of the early 80's stands to her mother's left, and my father stands on my grandmother's right, kissing her rose-stained cheekbone as delight frames her face, and curlers keep her tendrils pinned up, allowing me to admire her beauty some decades later.
I mentioned it at her funeral, and I'll mention it again despite people begging to differ, my eyes never lost sight upon how much she cared for my father. I will appreciate her for that, amongst everything else, till the day I die and am reunited with her.

I remember one night when I was 18 that our family had gathered at her house. She had asked me if I wanted to spend the night, after all I grew up nestling my head upon her chest and sleeping beside her every weekend up until I was about 15, and I remember having said that I'd rather go home. That conversation and the look of faint gloom on her face hits me on random days, at random hours, and the tears stream uncontrollably down my face.
Grandma, I never meant to grow up. I never meant to decline your offer. I never meant to grow out of our bond. I never meant to say no. If I were offered the chance to wake up to the smell of tea, milk and cigarettes wafting through the room, and the sound of her and grandpa conversing over the CNN news reporter, I would without a doubt accept. A breakfast consisting of pouched eggs with tomatoes and raw, white onions on the side has never again hit the spot the way it did each time I woke to her beautiful face and to her distinct smell of Alberto V05 shampoo, rose water and Marlboros.

This past week I began my master's program in English and as I sat in my first class, I smiled at the thought of her. When I was 15, I had told her that I wanted to be a choreographer, and to a 74-year-old foreigner, a "dancer" and a choreographer do not differ much. She said I should pursue it, and a minute later corrected herself. She had thought I meant stripper and said, "Me khai raghas beshee? Khob beshoe, vallee nah vaseh kar. Khoob neest zan een karaho bokoneh." My grandfather changed the subject and pointed to Christiane Amanpour on CNN and said that I soon would be like her, and then grandma smiled. I probably won't make it on TV but I'll make it somewhere, surely not on a pole yet somewhere that would've made her proud.

I don't know what else to say. Her passing was something I could have never prepared for, and I poured my heart's discontent out then. Losing someone you love is like a current you fight from drowning against. Simply put, there is only half of my life's hope that lives beating beside me now. She is gone, and for now thankfully my father still remains. I am at a loss for words. I still cannot imagine what has become of her and there is concrete evidence that lies against this fear, supporting it persistently from this day forth. My father could fall away from my sight tomorrow, and the other half of my hope will die along with him. I find it a delicate impression; my life's happiness began in the arms of the woman who gave birth to my mother, a woman whose happiness began in the arms of the man who will always be responsible for the end of mine, dead or alive.

Margrit Chaman Khankhanian: May 20, 1925 - September 10, 2009
You were my best friend and though I must live now with half of my being intact, I wish you sweet dreams of an epic magnitude, tonight and every night, knowing that you will always be something otherworldly, divine and simply impeccable. I love you always, now and forever.

Hault or Continue: For The Sake of My Sanity

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.