Confessions

I am biased against men with nasal voices. During my period, I become so photosensitive that I have to wear sunglasses. People think I am wearing them to be cool, but really it's because the light hurts my eyes so badly. My mother says you can see patriarchy on a man's face. I tell her I haven't developed that skill. You will, she tells me, by the time you're my age. We run through a list of the men in my life. She assures me that none of them have patriarchy on their faces. You pick men well, she says. My father definitely doesn't have patriarchy on his face. This might be the byproduct of being worn down by three very opinionated women. I miss home a lot. I miss reading in my pajamas on the couch in my parents' sunroom, surrounded by fica and banana and rubber trees. Reading in my pajamas is my favorite activity. I write really well in hotel rooms by myself. I discovered this on a focus group trip to Chicago. When I think about my parents at my age, young and adrift, it almost makes me cry. I don't know how they did it all and I don't know how I will either. I want to go back in time and be friends with them when they were my age. When I see pictures of myself in the third grade, fat and bespectacled and uninvited to slumber parties at the popular girls' homes, I want to hug the 8-year old me and tell her it gets better. They all become insurance agents in the tri-state area with boring husbands and you get...well, something else entirely, but it'll definitely be an adventure. The last time Jo was in LA, we decided that if she would be my interior decorator, I would be her personal stylist. I've been secretly wanting to make this agreement for a while. My favorite scene in Little Women is the scene where Jo comes home crying to her mother because she's just rejected Laurie, who she wishes she could love because it would make her life considerably easier, but she's too honest and willful and self-aware and also aware of how much this sucks and how difficult life will be for these reasons, and she wishes she could just be like everyone else and she turns in frustration to Susan Sarandon who says, "Jo, you have so many extraordinary talents - how could you expect to lead a normal life?" I always cry at this scene because it reminds me of the number of times my mother has given me some variation of this speech, and I think Jo is lucky to have Susan Sarandon as a mother. And I am so lucky to have my mom as a mother. My mother and I have decided we go back lifetimes, and when I am away from her, which is a lot, I miss her in my bones. I wonder what it might have been like if my parents had stayed in India and I had grown up in Delhi. I wonder what I would be like. I like 30. I think I will like 40 and 50. And probably 60. I like the idea of aging. I know the older I get, the more I will become the kind of person I like. When I go home next week, I will go into Manhattan and have lunch with my papa at that really good Chinese restaurant in midtown, and then I will go back to his office and look at the view of the Chrysler building outside his window. I love the view from his office window. I feel at home in the UN building. Once on the 4th of July, when I was 15, I had a fight with my mom on the UN lawn during the annual picnic. It was before the fireworks started, and even though we made up afterwards, sometimes I still feel bad about this. A year ago, I started smoking. Not much, just a cigarette every couple of days. I did this for a few months. But I never got good at it. I don't think I know how to properly inhale a cigarette, and when I do, it makes me kind of nauseous. So I stopped. But I cannot bear to be without my lighter. A certain calm in a metal box of fire. A certain longing for heat.