In 2014, when I was twelve, my mother gave me a thin green notebook because I complained about everything. She said I could write one wish in it every Sunday, and that she would never read it.
She never did. I filled forty pages in three years.
I wish I had a bicycle. I wish my brother would stop coming into my room. I wish I were the girl who is not afraid to read out loud in class. I wish we lived nearer to the school. I wish Sunday were two days.
Some of them are silly and I am not going to write them here. One of them, in March 2016, is I wish somebody knew what I want to do, because I do not.
I forgot the notebook completely. It stayed in a box of school things in my grandmother's house through two moves and one renovation.
My brother Bekzod found it in April, three weeks before my wedding, and he did not say one word about it for twenty days.
Then he stood up between the tables with a green notebook in his hand, and my whole family went quiet, and I understood everything one second before it started.
He read six wishes. He read the one about the bicycle, and my father laughed until he had to put his glass down, because the bicycle came in 2015 and it was second-hand and blue. He read the one about the girl who is not afraid to read out loud — and I teach thirty children in a school in Yunusobod, and I read out loud for a living.
Then he read: "I wish my brother would stop coming into my room and reading my things."
Two hundred people looked at Bekzod. He shrugged and said one sentence: "Some wishes are not granted, and it is lucky for everybody in this room."
The notebook is on a shelf in our flat. There is one thing in it I am still ashamed of: in 2016 I wrote I wish we weren't this family, after an argument about money on a Thursday.
If only I had written the next line as well. I remember the rest of that evening. My father sold his watch that week and nobody was supposed to know.