Big moves are on the way, but I’ll leave that for the next posting. In the meantime, the following story is my goodbye letter to my former co-workers at the Center for Digital Storytelling. In thinking about leaving I wasn’t sure what to say really; So often the experiences in our lives don’t have any conclusions at all. The best I could do then was paint a picture of what my last experience in California was like and assume those reading it know that my current experience has been much, much different.

Until I have the time to talk more about what my future path entails, the screenshot below marks where I’ll be moving to in August.

Potter Valley, California

A thank you. And a final story (for now).

The twin towers fell only a month-and-a-half after I moved in with Farshid, and on that sunny September morning I awoke him to the same news that my panicked mother had just called to tell me.

I threw open the sliding plywood door that separated our rooms, looked down at his sleeping, unaware face, and said something to the effect that a plane had just crashed into the Trade Center in New York City.

Farshid shot out of his sheetless, queen-sized bed that occupied most of the living room, and had the television on in an instant. It was still tuned to CNN from the previous night since he would spend every evening taking in the reports from Iraq and wondering about the survival of his family––a family he had left behind nearly 30 years before––and then we watched through the lens of a shaky camera the second, blurred plane bury itself into the other tower. Our eyes strained to comprehend the early morning images, and our voices, sunken into the depths of our stomachs, trailed miles behind us. The sound that spilled from Farshid, however, was a breathless and guttural moan that all but made up for the deafening silence coming from the terrified journalists reporting from the safety of their studios.

Until that day, Farshid would talk to his family once every few months via a secret 1-800 phone number he had established when he first moved to the States. That one number was the only way his family could call him without being discovered by Saddam Hussein’s government.

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In the classroom later that morning, it didn’t seem like anything had changed. It was as though the madness of that day only existed inside of our apartment. Students weren’t talking about NY. They were talking about weekend surfing, or drinking, or nothing at all.The instructor came in and took a tally of the number of students who knew what the Trade Towers were: less than five out of 20. One student asked if the towers were in Paris, or was it London? The instructor informed everybody of the severity of the issue and dismissed class for the rest of the week.

When I came back home, Farshid was right where I left him, sitting upright in bed with his strong back and brilliant white hair pressing against the wall. He was sobbing. His oversized muscle shirt was pulled over his knees, and his eyes were painfully and hopelessly glued to the television.

After that day, Farshid crumbled. His 1-800 number connecting him to Iraq was disconnected just days after the attack, and any possibilities for contact with his family evaporated. He knew the US would retaliate against who ever was responsible, and he knew Baghdad would be the first to be hit. He also knew that he would be profiled and watched by the United States government simply because he was from the region.Farshid would spend hours of every day trying to reconnect with his family. He needed to send them money, he’d say, but his accounts were frozen, his phone was tapped, his car was followed. The white nylon shades in the living room were always pulled down as far as they could go, exposing the naked wooden cylinder at the top and the pullstring touching the dusty baseboard heater at the bottom. The phone would ring and go straight to answering machine. If I called during the day to check-in and see if there was any new news, I would announce myself and plead with him to answer, knowing that he was just inches away, with eyes staring at the news reports on the television but his ears sharply tuned to my words. But rarely would he pick up the phone.

As the days grew darker with the coming of winter’s rainy season, and the nylon shades began to collect a uniform layer of dust quietly streaked by a stray, curious fingerprint pulling the curled lip of shade away from the window, my tenure at college came to an end.

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From behind the espresso machine, on most mornings I’d watch the earliest layers of light catch the edges of night-darkened cars passing-by outside, a silhouette of mountains highlighted in their windows.  5:00 AM commuters to LA were common, and I relied on them as a visual reminder to transition the shop’s pre-dawn drum n’ bass ambiance to a more coffee-friendly jazz station. By sunrise, Hollywood’s sunglasses and suits outweighed the Street’s split-soled shoes and rotting teeth. The end of the graveyard shift left me unsettled as I drank my first cup of morning coffee. The day would be just beginning, but in hazy stretches of the 48-hour cycle, there was little distinction between what was appropriately known as day and night. Then it would be time for class, and I would try my hardest to stay awake and take notes. Three and a half months into my first semester I decided to stop going after I voluntarily slept through my midterms.

I awoke nearly two days later to find that Farshid had covered all the exterior surfaces within our apartment with plastic wrap. Cabinets, door handles, faucets, the remote controls, the telephone, the handles of pots and pans, stove knobs and even the white nylon curtain’s pullstring was hastily slathered in a thick layer of thin and wrinkly plastic. It didn’t take long for the wrappings to accumulate countless, tacky folds of oily grime. But once the plastic wrap was applied, it never was changed. It soon turned from transparent to tan. A few days later, Farshid banned shoes in the apartment when he heard on the news that they were responsible for 88% of household infections. And in case my bare feet carried anything else that would endanger his health, he constructed a path of brown paper bags taped together lengthwise that led from the front door through the living room into my bedroom.

Farshid and I lived in that space for nearly nine months together until I learned from our Super that the rent for the entire apartment was $670, and of that I was paying $500 plus utilities.

Within days of finding out that I was paying for our life together in that disgusting little one-window apartment that smelled of liver drippings and gym shorts, I quit my job at the coffee shop, packed up my car, popped two Adderall, and arrived in Ithaca 2 days later like a dog with my tail between my legs.

I vowed never to return to California––that god-awful state––and its 4 AM meth-addict coffee drinkers, its flaccid plastic wrap furnishings, its surf-talk, and its endless, endless days filled with blue skies, black hearts and sheer insanity.

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Here I am again, nearly eight years later, and this time I’m staying here.

Thank you, Center for Digital Storytelling, for everything. California ain’t so bad, and you guys made it a whole lot better.

-Patrick

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