In a less politically charged world, globalization did not gulp my father’s apology for never being there, and my mother’s antique store never sold hemlock dining tables or vinyl records of laughter and forgetting and she never contemplated her abonnement issues through absurd questions like how many apologies does it take to buy someone’s sympathy.

My father by now feels like he has lost too much time while making antioxidant tea and killing creased spiders. And now he is making up for the lost time by creating new profound truths about himself. How he prefers everyone around him extremely quiet, how he is a reticent man who always had been too fascinated with cinders and things that don’t last nearly long enough as much they should.

Similarly, at 55, my mother realizes how she prefers verbose commercial noises over the voice of my father. My mother now believes all that is left of her relationship with my father is the residue of separation anxiety. My mother lacks restraints but loves Anna Karenina, my mother strongly identifies with my sufferings but can not hold herself during clicking a portrait. My mother. She is sinking and she doesn’t believe Dostoyevsky anymore when he says: Beauty will save the world.

My mother used to like beaded bracelets but doesn’t anymore and every time anyone shows her the slightest bit of compassion she puts her head in an oven and bursts into sobs But my parents are frightened and they are healing wrong. And by now they have grown an inordinately long queue of memories that will never get better, whims that have been poisoned by concerns and false optimism mixed in Chamomile tea that got cold

My parents with time have become each other’s necessities but are disconcerted by each other’s voices

That is all they are strung together by the mutual hope of not turning out like each other.