My mind travels a thousand miles away, always wandering off to foreign lands, foreign sounds, and foreign destinations. I don’t follow my mind. I let it wander on its own, but it trips me up, it turns me upside down. I get upset, remember that once again my mind has taken a turn on its own, without taking me along.
The city feels the same sometimes. Sometimes, it is so grandeur, so grand and abstract, so bizarre, that I don’t see it. It sees me. It takes me. It follows me in my head and takes over me. I ponder, lost, sad, because I am confused. My mind travels a thousand miles away, the city takes over what is left, and there you have it, a lost soul.
I don’t know if I always felt like this, though I remember the boredom of not knowing what to do with what I desired to feel. I longed to feel something. I longed to feel like I was running with impossible speed, as fast as my mind travels now. I didn’t like comfort and the satisfaction of knowing I was safe under my parents’ roof. I wanted to feel adventure, danger, some kind of thrill.
It was scary just imagining the city taking me hostage. But I longed to be taken. And so it happened. I turned 21. I grew up a little and went for it and here I am, lost, my mind traveling thousands of miles away.
I am wondering (how dare I) about London. What is London like? And what about Japan? Another adventure. The possibilities, the lights, the…
It never ends, this thirst for more. And I’m afraid, it still leaves me sad, because I am never really where I presently am because my mind has already left me.

I liked the smell of shoe wax in our hallway. Everyone waxed their shoes and I had learned to do it and enjoyed the particular sharp scent. I also liked putting shoes in order, like when guests came and they were on top of each other and disheveled, I would rearrange them and make them look neat. It was a thing to do; I was pretty bored at that age. My mom told me there is a saying in Farsi where if your shoes land on top of each other on their own as you take them off, that means you are going on a journey. I liked the idea of traveling and we generally did travel a lot. So when my shoes didn’t land on top of each other, I would do it myself. Sometimes, I did that to all shoes, which made everyone laugh. “Guess we are going on a trip!” I’d say, amused with wishful thinking.
My favorite moments were the nights before a trip, when we had a time limit to pack and get everything ready. Our trips were usually road trips to the Caspian Sea, where the beach was. So the trips were most often in the summer when Northern Tehran was humid and hot. That’s the only thing I didn’t enjoy, the extreme humidity. But I loved packing. I could never sleep the night before being filled with too much excitement. I’d still be awake at dawn, and the skies would be dark from our bedroom window, and a certain sadness would linger over the buildings from afar.
I liked that we were all together- my family and first and second cousins. We were inseparable. When we traveled, we always went together. We played card games and “esm va famil” (Name and family) where you pick a letter and everyone has to come up with names, last names, foods, cars, body parts, flowers, etc that started with that letter. Whoever finished first would say “Stop!” and then would read it all out loud.
I just remember being really happy, really excited. I loved when we all would get together in my cousin’s beach house and just laugh uncontrollably. That happens, when you spend so much time together and when you are all there to have fun, there are so many silly little moments of laughter. And the best part is, you can repeat them by retelling the story over and over, and then you laugh even harder.
But I hated returning home. I hated the last nights, where everyone naturally became quiet because we knew we’d have to go back home and get back to routines. My younger cousins and I didn’t want to go back to school and exams. And our parents probably didn’t want to go back to work. I learned nostalgia at a young age- I didn’t know it obviously, but that feeling continued returning over the years as people came into my life and left and things changed and weren’t the same, and then I learned about nostalgia in books and movies…and then I realized I already knew what it was. I never dealt with it either. I either got sick in the car on the way home, or later when I was older, I buried it in my throat and it hurt and sometimes if I were lucky and alone, cried it out. Even then, it still lingered, that ugly, nasty feeling of emptiness, of looking around a room and seeing it missing something, someone.
I like my childhood memories. They taught me to laugh and they were probably the happiest that I have ever been because I was satisfied with what I had. It was only later, when I lost things and gained more, that I learned of dissatisfaction and began building fantasies so grandeur that I lost the sense of natural happiness and contentment that I had once known so well.

I used to pray as a little girl. I used to ask him that all I ever wanted was for my family to be together, for us to be with Daddy. I used to make wishes. I used to cry myself to sleep thinking this, praying hard, begging some kind of God. I used to pray, when I was a kid.
And there was an answer, I got part of what I asked for. I got to be with Daddy. Me and Mom. But the rest of the family was still broken and I never got it fixed so I grew up and gave up praying. I don’t make wishes. I don’t rely on false hopes. I just move forward and daydream about the things I used to want and how I no longer want them.
As an immigrant, no matter how much you adapt to the new home, you never forget the pain you suffered. You never quite know who you are and what defines you. You try so hard to keep your past in the present and the present in itself but the two get mixed in and you get lost and you become powerless. It isn’t until you accept this blend of emotions and suffering that you get your power back. It isn’t until you go through a lot of hell before you love who you are. I don’t like talking about my past and how I used to feel like nothing. When you meet me, you have no idea how painful it was to be what I am before you. I talk like anybody else, walk like anybody else, and feign confidence and power so well I may come off intimidating. But I am so insecure, so powerless because I can’t forget what happened to me when I was 11 years old and my world changed without me knowing. It’s like I stepped into a fairy tale that for the longest time was a nightmare. I hurt so badly for my inabilities to understand the American Dream. I hurt so much for not knowing what it was that captivated Daddy so much, made him hate his past, made him fall in love with America. I didn’t deal with my pain. I just hoped it would go away. It did. After I learned to adapt and make a new present, I just forgot how I felt.
And today, I am still hurting. This is the pain of being an immigrant. This is the pain of being lucky to have the freedom that my own people die for, protest for, the same freedom that they fight as they get shot. This freedom hurts because I have it and I am burdened with luck and blessings. I am guilty for having this freedom that I didn’t fight for. This is the pain of immigration, the trauma of being given all the things you could ever want.
Even after 10 years, the pains of leaving and adjusting and moving all over don’t go away. And as you age, you look behind and every time you look back you can’t separate what was and what is. The little girl by the Caspian Sea is no longer me. I don’t pray. I don’t know how I do it anymore. I am not one, but two, three, four, five different parts. I don’t know how many exactly, but each time I am someone else, as each year passes, I am always remembering and it still hurts.
This is the pain and solitude of an immigrant.

She wonders. She drinks coffee out of a creme colored mug and stares at the melted snow on the porch. She puts down her cup and stares at the kitchen floor and wonders where she will go next. She will return to the city in about a week and she is looking for another job. She is already concerned about the summer, will she stay, will she come back home, will she go apartment hunting…with what money?
She keeps drinking her coffee and now it’s cold. She puts it in the microwave for 15 seconds. Everyone is working. Her father is somewhere doing a crossword puzzle out of a Persian newspaper. Her sister is at the office, eating the peanut butter sandwich she made the night before.
She makes another pot of coffee. She stares out the window, at the fan that turns with the wind. She feels sad, but is content if only for a second because the coffee is warming her a bit.