Child

I look down at my phone and it says Baba and I realize I haven’t seen him since that time I was at home on the couch reading and my mom was sitting at the dining table on a chair cracking pine nuts one by one, gently placing them in her mouth and slightly biting down on them as she usually does and he was screaming at the top of his lungs into the air around him, not sure who he was yelling at and who he was throwing furniture at, and now he is calling me with his sad voice, but it also sounded like he didn’t know why he was sad, like he was a bit resentful of his sadness and that I was listening to it without acknowledging it, so he covered the sound with a tender Salaam, bachem trying to perform joy, oh shit, yeah, the Warriors won last night and he is actually happy and I want to vomit because he is a child and the Warriors are fake anyways because they are stacked just because KD, who is a child too, wants a ring.

My mind gets foggy as I fight the urge to ask him how he is, but he continues to talk and asks me how my shift was as if I want to tell him, as if I want to talk to him at all, as if he wasn’t sleeping every night on the couch of his older widowed sister’s apartment whose walls are strewn with faded black and white pictures of dead people that are buried in mass graves in a land that I have never visited nor, I think, I even care to visit because my dad is a child and I don’t want to visit a land that raises children like him that sleep on the couch and rely on sports teams for their happiness, so I just say Okay, it was busy and suddenly I feel guilty that I even answered the phone call, that I betrayed my mom’s struggle against the patriarchy even though she wouldn’t even call it that, wouldn’t even be mad that I answered the phone, would tell me it is my duty to talk to him and would use that word, duty, and suddenly I noticed I wasn’t breathing and at the same time heard my dad take a deep breath in from his vape pen, using it to inhale the words he wanted to speak to me, thinking it was a literal pen that could write his words in the air, words that may not have been his, maybe belonged to the air, the air around us that might be occupied by the ghosts of our ancestors that are buried in mass graves and were now hovering around us all the time and somehow determined all of our decisions without us even knowing or understanding.

I am getting married, I am having a child.