Slow Dancing in a Burning Room

I am not writing this for sympathy or a response.

I could talk about so many things and issues at this point. For instance, I recently graduated from graduate school. I am now 25 years old, have three degrees and the job hunt is going on six grueling months. I took part in my first Critical Mass last Friday, and felt a rush as I joined hundreds upon hundreds of other bikers in a ride pulsing through the city’s veins and literally stopping traffic for three hours. What else? Local elections are in full bloom and Ben Hall’s campaign is a joke. Obamacare, U.S.-Iran relations, future vacations, and the list of potentials continues.

Unfortunately, all I can think about is how the past two months and ten days have been hell without her.

I have come to realize that there is nothing more devastating than a relationship not working because of little things that could have easily been resolved or prevented. It didn’t fail because someone fell out of love or you were polar opposites, but because you couldn’t get your shit together and you thought you had all the time in the world.

We always joked about how I should write a manual about her. I don’t have that much time, but I thought maybe I could narrow it down to the top things I would do differently. I am hoping that by getting this out into words, maybe they’d stop plaguing my every thought.

1.     If in 48 hours you aren’t going to remember what the argument was about, then it isn’t worth it. This is so much easier said than done. Also, if you are dating a Latina/Latino, this one is superduper vital. It took tons of meditation and reflection to realize that none of the arguments we had really mattered, and that I could have easily put my pride to the side and compromised. Really resolve the problems and really get past them. Don’t save them up to use as ammunition in the next argument.

2.     Write letters. Nothing beats a genuine hand-written letter. At the beginning, this was easy because we were in a long-distance relationship. Most times, it took me an extra 30 minutes to write her a letter because I wanted to do it in cursive. I look back over our letters and postcards, and it is really something to read just how crazy we were about each other. The writing slowed down my last semester of school and stopped completely once I moved back. If I could do it over, I would leave her little notes and letters taped to the smoothie I’d make her in the morning, in her apron pocket for work, or on the pillow before my run in the morning.

3.     Don’t get so jealous. You are with this person for a reason. Something attracted you to him/her and odds are that someone else will find it just as attractive. She is the most beautiful soul I ever met, and everyone is bound to fall in love with her at some point. She can’t help that smile and personality, and she was yours. She loved you. She chose you. You get to go home to your partner every day, so stop worrying about that infatuated coworker or friend she spends a little time with. It’s obvious who she’s with and she has never given you a reason to worry.

4.     Show and tell your love. Every. Damn. Day. I would make sure that she never questioned my feelings for her, because I would tell her and show her all the time. I wouldn’t assume that she must know since we live together and have already been together for two years.

5.     Support their dreams from start to finish, and don’t let them get distracted. She had a million and a half brilliant thoughts running through her mind about what she wanted to do. She wanted to cook, dance, travel, fight against human trafficking, get a bike with gears, open up her own refrescaria, paint, and so many other things. We would make lists upon lists of how to approach them and what we needed to do. A few days later we’d get distracted by the upcoming rent, having to pick up extra shifts, etc. If I could do it over, I would make sure that we followed through on every one of those things and motivate her every step of the way.

6.     Don’t let yourself go. My low point includes gaining almost 20 pounds after the start of graduate school and not caring even when I graduated. Also, I would make sure my eyebrows and legs were always taken care of, even in the winter.

7.     Take date night seriously. Delegate one night out of the week just to take her out and show her off. Staying at home and watching a movie would not count. Also, I would actually look for all the free events throughout town when money was tight, so no excuses.

8.     Learn how to dance. I mean, really learn how to dance. Sure, I would get up and dance whenever she asked me to (I would make a complete ass out of myself without hesitation), and I’d do a basic salsa with her, but I would learn how to spin and dip her. I would get good enough to where I could get out there and not have to look at my feet and count in my head the whole time. I would make sure that she was really enjoying herself and spend hours lost on the floor.

I held off on learning to dance, taking care of myself, letters, date nights, and dreams, because I thought we really had all the time in the world. I didn’t push myself to be better because I figured I could get started on it tomorrow, next week, or next month. I love her with everything that I am and she loved me for everything she knew I could be. In the end, she told me I was the one who broke her heart.

Now that I am in the future looking back, all these things seem so simple. Unfortunately, it took losing her for me to realize it.

Fools Rush In

I am thinking that I am just going to drop out of school and write my memoir. Here's the start.
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I grew up in Texas with an Iranian father and Filipino mother.



Let that marinade and simmer a minute.



After nearly a quarter of a century, I have grown accustom to the how-the-heck-did-that-happen response. I love telling the story of how they beat the odds, and yes, they are still married.

Mama was born in a house somewhere in Cebu, Philippines. For whatever reason, she makes it a point to remind me that healthcare professionals delivered all her four younger siblings in state-of-the-art hospitals. Her family moved to Chicago when she was seven years old, so she is more American than anything.

She rarely talks about Chicago and she lived there until the start of high school. Somewhere around this point in her life she was dating a family friend’s son, and his name was Fidel Castro. I know.... I know. They once lost Fidel at the Chicago O’Hare International Airport, and his mother nearly had a heart attack when the airport employees refused to page Fidel Castro over the intercom.

Fast forward a bit and my grandparents packed their five children and belongings into a station wagon and moved to Channelview, Texas, a town stuck somewhere between Houston and Louisiana with plenty of racial slurs for Asian families at the time. Nevertheless, Mama danced on the drill team, played on the volleyball team, and was a social butterfly. The only thing questionable about all of this is her volleyball team ordeal, especially since she is only five feet tall (on a good day).

She secretly wanted to be a designer, which I never knew until recently, but was sent down the path most common to Filipinos, which was towards a career in nursing.

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My father, who will be referred to as Baba from this point on, was born in a small town called Khorramshahr near the border of Iran. He would always tell us stories about growing up as the youngest out of four boys in Tehran (complete opposite of my mother, who was the oldest of five children). By the end of his stories, I usually have tears in my eyes from laughing so hard, and from wishing I had been there to experience Iran the way he did before the Islamic Revolution.

My grandmother already had three rowdy pre-adolescent boys when she started developing an intense pain in her back. Her doctor told her to get pregnant and that would cure it, so she did and that was the end of her ailment. Nine months later, there was a ten-pound bouncing baby boy. That was Baba.

His two older brothers went to the University of Texas in Austin, while the third one studied engineering in Iran. Baba was sent to Texas to avoid being drafted to fight in the First Persian Gulf War. He was 16 at the time.

On the airplane, he heard Stevie Wonder’s “You are the Sunshine of my Life” for the first time. Whenever he hears this song, you can see him transported through time to that very moment.

I am not entirely sure how he ended up at La Porte High School, but it was only 20 minutes away from Channelview. One time, he forgot his worn-out Persian to English dictionary on the bus home from school. When he called about it, the bus company informed him that they could only find a wrinkled copy of some foreign holy book, which was actually his dictionary.

As much as Mom was a socialite, I imagine Baba was just as socially awkward. He has always had an infectious sense of humor, though, and a love for puns.

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A couple of years later, Baba was taking a government class at a community college, which my mom took at a different time.  This class gave its students the option of writing a paper or volunteering at a campaign office for the local elections. Fortunately for me, the latter option was most appealing for both of them and that is how they met.

Mom was fashionable and had a cute perm, while Baba was thinner than thin with hand me downs from his much larger brothers. His hair was down to his shoulders and he had not quite discovered deodorant yet.

Three months later they were married.

Apparently immigration discovered Baba was living under his brother’s social security number and threatened to deport him. I think the proposal was something along the lines of, “They are going to send me back to Iran. My brothers have found a woman to marry me, but I would much rather marry you. If you don’t want to, we can keep dating after I get married.”

Mom would not hear of it and accepted his proposal. She laughed throughout the ceremony at the courthouse, to the point where the judge asked her to settle down.

He was 18 and she was 20.

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