The buttcrack of dawn on a Sunday and I’m already in the bedroom, slaving over the Korea Textile maquiladora archive for any glimmer of a publication-worthy doctoral dissertation. Except it’s not really the bedroom, it’s the “office”. Nooshin’s new name for her bedroom, which she is fastidiously pimping. Every time I utter the phrase “your bedroom” she smiles hopefully and says “Don’t you mean the office?” Semantics to me, an invisible pivot to her. Because if I start calling it the “office” instead of “your bedroom”, then it’s official. We’re living together. Not just under the same roof as roomies, but in the same bed as –

What are we, really? Buddies plus? Friends with fuckbuddy privileges? Boyfriend/girlfriend? That’s the real semantic dilemma here. Not this “office” and “your bedroom” shit.

Anyway.

I’m focused on the archive. Laser-focused. Using the kind of research tools that would amaze the giants whose shoulders I’m standing on. What would Foucault have wrought with internet porn and Google? Actually, that sounds like a better dissertation topic than small family-owned maquiladoras. I wonder if it’s too late to reinvent myself as an academic porn maven.

Double anyway.

Back to the archive. What a marketing blowjob that is, calling it an archive. Right now it’s just perilous stacks of yellowing paper that haven’t been sorted. Or indexed. Or paginated. Until then it’s a so-called archive. Kinda like Nooshin’s so-called bras, which are just micro-tanktops with pretensions. The Victoria’s Secret catalog prefers the term bralettes. I’ve never seen her wear one. But this way she’s a flat-chested girl who has bras, as opposed to a flat-chested girl who doesn’t even bother.

Triple anyway. FOCUS ON YOUR GODDAMN RESEARCH!

And finally I do.

For about five minutes, until that infamous laser-focus of mine is shattered by the sound of her voice. Keening. From the kitchen.

“I wanna be…the First Lady of Infinity!” she’s singing, dragging out the last consonant into infinity-eeeeeeeee!

That’s it. I hurtle into open space, slicing from her bedroom — the presumptive office — into the living room and finally the kitchen. In a grand total of two strides.

I discover Nooshin leaning over the stove, a stick figure in a wifebeater and saggy hiphuggers. She’s tending a pan of sizzling bacon. She keeps breaking into dance, spiraling around in her bunny slippers and repeating that line — “I wanna be…the First Lady of Infinity-eeeeeeeee!”

She freezes in mid-spin, and our semantic dilemma of a house is plunged into silence. Those widening eyes transfix me — until the right one drifts aside. I’m stranded in uncomfortable focus, hanging in the open doorway between living room and kitchen. My face is an irritable scowl. My boxer shorts are distorted by the tent-pole aimed at her.

“Oh! Hi,” she says a little breathlessly, and stops with her bunny slippers nosed together. Her gaze flickers between my face and my crotch. “So…what’s up?” She begins to dissolve into giggles. “Get it?”

What nobody knows about Nooshin — she really is the biggest goofball in the world.

I can’t peek into that pretty head of hers, but I imagine a vivid inner cosmos of silly puns and off-the-wall jokes and giggle fits that last for days. How else do you explain the way she’ll suddenly grasp my bicep and sag into me, stifling laughter? Or how she busts into spontaneous rap when I call for an update on her digitization progress: “The scanner is booming — everything is cool — I pull a couple hundred bucks a week — screw school!”

Nooshin seems to glow with inner light, a girl who always finds humor in her circumstances, no matter how bleak. At first I worried that she was a dork, or even manifesting a gradual derangement. But now I know better.

It’s depressing to realize that she’s always been like this, a girl trying to fill the gaping voids in her life where people should be. Humor is her self-defense. Her way of explaining to herself why strangers don’t befriend her. Why her parents and aunts pressured her to marry a stranger in a photograph. Why her sister coerced her to stay married to Saman. Why her husband and in-laws never showed her any love.

Maybe they’ve known Nooshin longer, but they don’t know her better. They don’t know the tortured girl who can still laugh about her circumstances. The free spirit who just wants to bloom. The brave face confronting Mexico. The gorgeous melting gasp beneath me.

She’s the girl they never wanted to know.

If they can’t understand what I feel for Nooshin — this combustive attraction of laughter and wide-ranging conversations and almost scary-strong passion — that’s their loss, not mine.