So I’ve gotten in the habit of speedreading Nooshin’s notebooks while she’s taking a protracted leg-shaving shower. And yeah, I feel guilty about it. Can’t-stop-myself guilty, like when I was a horny teen raised to believe that masturbation was a passing lane on the highway to hell.

Her notebooks are the only private space she has in this claustrophobic house, where the walls are so thin I can hear the crinkle of a tampon wrapper. She leaves one notebook out as a decoy, a corner jutting from beneath the pillow on her new twin bed. Its pages are filled with rambling observations of Tijuana life and ink sketches based on the polaroids that she snaps. But the other notebook — the juicy notebook — is tucked into the bottom of her backpack, hidden beneath everything piled on top. How I found it there…

Well, like I said. I’m feeling can’t-stop-myself guilty.

The juicy notebook’s pages are full of confessional revelations. Fractured poems of crushing insecurity. Unsent letters to her sister Nasrin that read like plaintive wails. And since we’re talking Nooshin here, lists. Heartfelt lists of things that would’ve made her a better wife, places to visit before she dies, the rollercoaster emotions she’s felt in a single day.

I was kind of relieved, kind of disappointed to discover that my name rarely makes a cameo anywhere in her notebooks. I’m just a “he” or half of a “we”. Maybe it’s because she doesn’t think about me very often. Maybe it’s because she already thinks about me too much. So nothing takes me by surprise when I flip to the latest page in her juicy notebook and find a poem with “we” and “our” and “he” in it:

Tijuana

the first week we live here there is no electricity
we navigate the dark by flashlight
and use the refrigerator to keep pancake mix away from the mice
water runs rusty in the toilet
if it flushes at all
and I decorate the floor with buckets and pots
when it rains

our first visitor is a dead cat
motionless on the “lawn”
a tiny rectangle of pink and aqua-colored patio pavers
we did rock-scissors-paper to see who’d shovel it
into the garbage can
he cheated
to lose

he can’t make the backdoor light work
even after he replaces the bulb
and the fuse
and the switch
and the socket
and each time
he confronts the fusebox or touches hopefully dead wires
I remind myself that he’s lucky
if no electrician

I’m responsible for the wine rack
a pretentious model of many wooden pieces
that I crowd into form
with carpenter’s glue and epithets
“it’ll be so cool!” he keeps encouraging
although he drinks our wine faster than we can store it
living here

it is my fifth move in as many years
from the house in East LA where I grew up
to wifely imprisonments across the map
and now this place in Tijuana which
I suspect will be imprinted as a series of residential crises
that unwind like a sitcom arc

I can’t believe this is home
a destination all the other moves never reached
but that’s love for you
maybe

Well, nothing takes me by surprise — until that last part. And worse, how quickly the bathroom quiets and opens. I’m a stampede out of her bedroom, almost caught red-handed.

Nooshin emerges with a towel wrapped around her head, which only exaggerates her skyscraper height. She’s swimming in a too-big hoodie and plaid sweatpants that hang on her legs like drainpipes. Only her new bunny slippers fit. Looking down at them she almost runs right into me. “What’s up?”

I wave a bottle of New Year’s fuel at her. “Come on. Let’s go drink our cheap champagne.”

“It won’t make me sick, will it?”

“Probably,” I sigh. 24 years old and she’s only been drinking for the last week. Her tolerance is measured in sips and vomits. Proof that she was a good Muslim until she met me, I guess.

We trickle onto the front stoop and sit hip-to-hip in the evening murk, huddling for warmth. The breeze makes it feel even colder than 50 degrees. I pop the plastic cork, letting it fly into the street, and pour champagne into coffee mugs. The sickly-sweet crap doesn’t even taste like I spent 7 bucks on it. It goes down my throat like alcoholic Gatorade.

Around us the horizon is already lit for the new year. Mexican kids are setting off bottle rockets and sparklers that flare above the rooflines into the darkening sky. A few blocks away is the glow of Colonia Aviacion’s business district, still hung with Christmas lights. Beyond the dark lip of the border fence is broad daylight, a chain of floodlight towers reaching from the Pacific to the Sierra Nevadas.

Nooshin shivers into me. “Do you have any New Year’s resolutions?”

“Nah. I never got in the habit. My family doesn’t believe in New Year’s resolutions. We’re supposed to be perfect year-round. What about you?”

She tucks her knees under her chin. “Well, I came up with this huge list…”

I swig my champagne and settle in, yawning at the dark cloud-strewn sky. Nooshin is big on lists.

“…but mostly it boils down to this — I’m not going to disappoint you.”

I wait for more, but there isn’t any. “You’re not going to disappoint me,” I say in bafflement.

“I promise I won’t.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Like, I’m going to become fluent in Spanish. I’m going to learn all this stuff that you take for granted, stuff about Mexico. I’m going to finish digitizing the entire archive and help you with other projects.” She sips her champagne and coughs. “You’ll be glad you met me, Nick Roberts.”

The words are transfixing. I’m already glad I met her. Too goddamn glad, considering the collateral turmoil. Nooshin has changed my life like a natural disaster. I was a grad student mercenary until we met, a couple miles west of here on Avenida Revolucion. Now it’s two months later and I’m living in Tijuana with her, even though she’s still married to a guy I only know from her photo album and that broken nose. I need a Nick-to-Nick talk. Dude, what the fuck?

“I thought this was going to be the worst year of my life, the way it was ending up. Leaving Saman — and my family basically disowning me for it, you know? I was so afraid of being all alone. But then I met you.” Her smile is a shy glimmer in the dark.

“Yeah, well…”

“Well what?”

“I figured the best thing about this year would be finishing my coursework, and passing my orals, and getting the fuck outta UCLA. But then I met you.” My voice trails off into a chain of firecrackers, hissing and popping in the street.

The coffee mug in my hand clinks. “Aide shoma mobarak,” she says, and empties out the rest of her champagne onto the pavers. “That means Happy New Year in Farsi, if you were wondering.”

“Feliz Año Nuevo is how you say it in Spanish.”

“Rappy Roo Rear! In Scooby Doo speak.”

I nudge her with a shoulder, laughing. “That’s gotta be the worst Scooby Doo voice I’ve ever heard.”

“I warned you I’m no good at voices, didn’t I?” She glances over at me, her crooked eye flashing more white on one side than the other. “I’ll remember this New Year’s for as long as I live.” A sentiment that could’ve been sarcastic, a cutting remark like Phoebe would make, or my sister if she went off her happy pills, but coming from Nooshin it’s genuine. She wants to treasure this memory as long as she can.

And today I woke up thinking the same thing.