Nothing Lasts.

I remember limping up to your apartment four years after I’d last seen you. In that time, your mother died in a freeway accident. They found a wet-nosed bunny cradling her skull outside of Yazd. Your apartment building was the color of blended chicken heads before they are fed to the cats. It was a pale pink, so pale that it intersected with gray and I could not bear to think of you, colorful like the opalescent moon, inhabiting a cockroach-infested building, with smells like the rotting sea. The elevator reeked of sweat, its walls sticky and the entire building tasted humid. I felt my many layers of clothing stick to my back and to my chest. It was an oily-dirty feeling that I could only shake off when I saw you, grinning faintly as you opened the door. I missed you so much! How many years had it been again? I paused a moment to remember.

The Showroom

The showroom was so hot that the editors and the buyers and the ex-supermodels soon slumped over in their chairs, like silly putty that starts out stiff then softens over time to show what it really is. And so their crisp layers peeled away, their make-up skidded down their oily cheeks and streamed down their shiny foreheads. Their flat hair curled at the edges and at the top. Soon they turned into what they long attempted to conceal behind expensive makeup and luxurious clothing and leather boots that zipped up to their knees. Finally, the models emerged, each one more pale and more wiry than the last. They marched to the murmuring of a thousand flapping paper fans.

The models wore simple black dresses that appeared too small and too large at the same time, swallowing their perfect, painted toes and obscuring their shiny stilettos. The show was very dramatic. I choked on its suffocating silence, I choked while studying the slow, reverse transformation of one thousand beautiful people. I observed them revert back into their natural states, how gently yet how surreptitiously the heat folded away their smiles and placed them on the floor, near five thousand dollar handbags and two thousand dollar clutches. How quickly the men wore their tight lips and the women their lopsided expressions.

Separation Sturdier than Brick

I remember you. Desolate and dark, swinging supple, golden girls into the warm air while crying inwardly. Sometimes I regret letting you go, regret rejecting the mere thought of you until it broke apart and dissolved. On nights such as these, when the wind plays a sweet melody with the tree’s heart-shaped leaves, I am reminded of you. The memories flicker for seconds at a time, their duration short and severe. Though it is still enough to whisper open my wounds and will the sand-paper scars to reappear.









image by laila riazi