My Neighbour’s Arabic
My neighbour’s Arabic cooking smells .
Like Persian food.
Doesn’t smell like meat on the BBQ. Doesn’t smell like fries.
It smells like love and tradition. It smells like societal constraints and gender roles. It smells like a grandmother. It smells like distant and faint memories of land in our minds. A place that no longer is there. Not physically, not spiritually. It smells like nostalgia. It smells like everything you ever wanted and never got. It smells like people you loved but who passed too soon. It smells like the heartbreak of a teenage girl.
I wonder if its like this for my parents too. Do they mourn Iran the way that I do? My mourning was subconscious until recently.
Oh, how I miss my childhood home.
Even if I was home, It wouldn’t be the same. So much has changed.
It’s humbling to think that you never really have anything at all. Definitely not material things. Nor places, nor people. Not even the spirit of a place, a lifestyle, a culture. It’s all temporary.
After writing this, I flipped through my journal and found this:
“ Let everything happen to you.
Beauty and terror.
Just keep going.
No feeling is final”
By Rainer Maria Rilke.
How beautiful and fitting is that?
