Pink Twirly Flower Dress

It’s 4th of July 1987. She’s a seven year old girl in a pink short twirly flower dress with a bow tied in the back. She is thin, and tall for her age, with short black hair reaching under her ears. She is so overwhelmingly excited she keeps twirling in her mind while she actually sits impatiently on a metal bench feeling the cold bars under her bare legs, looking at her white socks with a lace trim and the fading marks of chicken pox.

She has been waiting for this moment for a year; the longest year of her life. She is waiting to see her dad at an airport in New York. She keeps running towards him in her mind. Before this moment, she was in Switzerland with her mother and brother for more than a week trying to get visas. Three train rides from Zurich to Bern. Nutella sandwiches for lunch on the train rides. There were seven blue cloth suitcases with silver masking tape around them. There was a fountain at the hotel where her brother found an ant farm and removed some stones around it and got yelled at by the angry hotel lady in French. She keeps scribbling in her notebook in what she calls cursive.

What did she leave behind? What did she pack? There is a year of memories without her father in Tehran, during a war. There are many letters. Waiting at night at a phone booth to make an international call from Tehran to Pennsylvania. Seven English workbooks that she completed to reach the eight one which is brown. The only one she packed with her. There is a photo of her dad in the back side of her pink Japanese pencil case she took to school with her all year. He was with her all along.

She is getting restless. She is not sure what life would be like in America but she knows whatever it is, it’s going to be ok because her father will be there and their family will be back together again. 

She replays running to her father to hug him in her mind over and over again, in the car ride from the airport to a hotel room, her pink dress dancing around her. She tries not to replay her father passing out from exhaustion and excitement when they reached his car in the parking lot of the airport. His eyes turning completely white, and her mother stuffing green grapes in his mouth to bring him back to consciousness. He had been driving without a stop for days. 

She looks at the fireworks lighting up the night sky and the very tall buildings passing by so quickly. There is a new life waiting for her in this awaited new big country and everything is alright now. Yes, everything is alright. 
#Fathersday