My mother’s job is to forget, to bury her memories deep into the folds of her clothes, the wrinkles around her eyes. My job is to unravel them, unwrap those lost memories. I remember my childhood vividly. I know what my mother looked like then, how she acted, how her voice quivered less when she sang. We used to share the same space. I played where she worked on her embroidery. Often, she sang, without introduction, without explanation. She sang and I listened and I never questioned her. It became a tune my ears grew to associate with love and sadness. She sang with love, but there was deep sadness buried underneath, in the lyrics, in her voice. At nights, after my father had left, I slept next to her. I never feared anything on those nights. In the mornings, I wanted to stay in bed even long after she had gotten up to make breakfast. She had a red velvet robe that she wore often, a gift from my father, I think. As a kid, I liked seeing her wear it. She kept it neatly in her little closet and on occasion, when she was away, I’d slip it on.
My mother has forgotten most of her life before the age of 50. She has brief moments of recognition. Sometimes, she’ll hear a certain song and she’ll either smile or ask me to change it. Forgetting and remembering are both skills we all share or lack. My brother and I are both good at remembering our childhoods and the people in them. My mother and sister remember little, and what little they remember is so faint that it might as well not be a memory.
It’s not that I live in the past. My childhood is certainly over and nostalgia is here to linger forever in my dreams and thoughts. But from remembering, I can relate to my family, to people I’ve lost and loved. I can recall how I was, and sometimes it’s easier to understand my current inner conflicts. But for people like my mother, the past has no meaning and there is no point in going back or in nostalgia. In fact, I don’t think my mother is nostalgic. Her wish to have been a singer is not nostalgia, but just a lost dream. She is too practical to let nostalgia in. She may not be a singer, but she has more success at 61 than her teenage years and her teenage dreams.
Forgetting is not an easy thing for me. I am plagued with the desire to write and remember. The losses are piling up in my book of nostalgia, the people, the places, all the things happened then. I am going to remember everything because I am free, like my mother is now.

Dad called my cell today around 7 pm. I almost panicked. He never calls, especially not from his cell. He told me he and Mom are driving to Maryland to visit relatives. He sounded happy and said I sounded better than usual. I am doing fine, aren’t I, he wanted to know. I said sure, now that I hear you Dad I am much better. He asked if I had dinner yet. He has never asked me that before.
Now talk your Mother, he says. My mother asks if I am chewing on something. Chips, I say. She says, I thought so. Suddenly there is a break of silence and I ask what happened? A truck just zoomed by us, too close, she says. I gasp and for a moment, I am terribly frightened of the possibility.
We say goodbye, happily reminding each other that I will see them soon for Thanksgiving. And then I sit on my bed and think about them. Recently, I call home seldom, way less than previous semesters. I am not busy. I just don’t want to sound so disappointing all the time. I like to wait for a time that I am actually happy, but that’s almost never. So in order to not disappoint her, I don’t call and hope that she does. Sometimes she does, even if we both aren’t talkers on the phone.
What I like about her is that she often remembers to say, “Look, you always figure it out, so just don’t worry so much.”
And then, she laughs. She has this comforting laugh, small, not too loud, not too big, just enough to reassure me.

At age 10, I stepped into a life outside of Iran for the first time. With two suitcases each, Mom and I arrived in October to the cold city of Brussels. There was no American embassy in Tehran so in addition to seeing my brother, Mom hoped we could get visas to see my father in the States.
The skies looked bigger, the streets seemed wider, the air smelled cleaner. A subway train ran in front of my brother’s apartment building on Rue de la Brasserie. It was 1998 and Iran had not yet built a subway system. In the one-bedroom apartment, Mom and I nestled on the small sofa bed with multiple blankets to keep ourselves warm. There was no heater so I shivered every time I went to bed. Under layers of blankets, I fixated my eyes on the unfamiliar and new ceiling.
Whenever we could, the three of us walked. Mom and I took charge of the laundry. As the temperatures dropped, we had a harder time walking to the Laundromat, even though it was just a block away. In Tehran, we had our own washing machine. Grocery shopping opened a whole new world for me. I pushed the cart, begging for more chocolate and biscuits, and all sorts of things that I had not seen in Tehran. There, Mom bought her produce and bread from an individual deli and bakery. The only large supermarket was at least an hour drive and since we didn’t have a car, we rarely shopped there.
When we came back after grocery shopping at Delhaize, we climbed two flights of steep stairs in a very narrow stairway, always out of breath when we reached the top. The building was small and dingy, the air hardly breathable. Mom hated it. When I was older, she told me that those three months were unbearable because she couldn’t accept that her oldest son was living under such circumstances. She hated being a burden, occupying his small space and having him take time away from work to entertain us, play the part of tour guide. While Mom lived with guilt, I basked in pleasure. I loved every minute of my long vacation.
For the first time, I witnessed public displays of affection. On a train ride home, I watched the reflection of a couple French kissing in the window and couldn’t stop staring. They were tall, much taller than people in Tehran, and blond. They seemed to be glued together, their mouths one entity. I was disgusted, yet intrigued.
During the weekends, the three of us walked to Place Flagey Square. The weeping willow branches floated on top of the lake. Towards the end of the park, there was a big palace museum. I took my brother’s hand as we crossed the grass and made our way to the palace. His firm hand reassured me that we were okay, that somehow it was normal for me to be in a new country and not responsible for anything. I noticed how everything was greener, how the lake was clear, inviting and pleasant.
In Iran, the closest water was the Caspian Sea, at least an hour and a half drive from Tehran up north. With my brother in that great grand field, everything appeared before me like an illusion, like a beautiful dream. I didn’t know of nostalgia so I lived those moments fully, even while knowing their transience. I wasn’t naïve to think my family would reunite, that we’d all go back to Iran and be the way we were. I was just hopeful, happy.
Though the skies were often gloomy, I loved looking out the bedroom window. Instead of hearing the Islamic Azan, a religious chant, I heard church bells from the Saint Antoine Church. Listening to the bells everyday was a strange experience, like I had stepped into a movie that I hadn’t read the script for. The unfamiliarity of the echoing sound, the way the church stood tall and dark, all became memories I held onto years later. I coped with it. I listened and looked for it. When we finally left, I longed for it.
The three months I lived in Brussels would be the last time I experienced happiness in childhood. I knew Mom and I would not live there permanently since we had plans for America. There was no pressure to blend in. I didn’t have to learn French or go to school and assimilate. I walked the streets holding onto Mom’s cold fingertips, never looking up to see her anguish and sadness.
Though we never got our visas at the end of the trip, I remembered Brussels as my first experience in a new world, open, free and mesmerizing. I admired my brother’s courage to settle in a new place, learn the language and build a new life.
Since then, immigration, the move to new places, the longing for the unfamiliar became not only my life, but also my obsession. I was never able to create the simple bliss of the months in Brussels, but I continued to search for experiences, discoveries, and later, for home.

Sometimes I am not sure which language to write in: English or Farsi. When I miss Tehran, whatever is left of it in my memories, I like to think about it in Farsi. I like to remember names and naturally I’d rather write them in Farsi, but my thoughts are so American now, my words and feelings that sometimes, it won’t justify to write in Farsi. Such an irony, to have to write about your native land in a foreign language.
When you are trapped in two, it’s hard to pick one, both incomplete, both insufficient to how you actually feel inside, the pains you go through to correct and retry and rewrite and rethink. The act of translation is tiring. The thinking of the two together, wrapped in one, wrapped in the insides of my clothes, my body, my head, is exhausting. When I am trapped in the subway trains in Manhattan, I think about the weight of the two worlds and sometimes, I have trouble breathing. When we pass other trains so fast that for a second we might almost collide, I think of death– will my last thought be in Farsi, in my native tongue, or will it be English or will it possibly be the little bit of Spanish that still lingers in the back of my head. Such a strange thing to know languages and yet not know yourself, what you want, what you are eventually going to become.
For years I have been assimilating my mind, my body, my being to this American living, this way of existence. I have been training myself to speak flawless English, to write poetically and lyrically and get away with my shortcomings of the language. I have done the transition so well that I can almost forget about it, forget all the trouble I went through, all the times I cried because I couldn’t understand, because I not only lacked culture, but language. I can almost forget when I am with others, with Americans, with friends, laughing, joking, being sarcastic about my life. But alone, inside the subway, in classrooms, in my mind, I always remember that the struggle is not yet over, that there are still parts of me that haven’t accepted the new me, haven’t quite forgiven the old, the one that made mistakes and has now filled my mind with memories of shame and embarrassment.
I write in English and in Farsi. I sing in Farsi and when I do, I feel a better connection. While singing, I don’t need to understand all. I can project it out loud, my fears, my anger, my love and frustration for Iran, for Farsi, for that childhood sweetness that becomes smaller and smaller as I get older, as I assimilate. When I sing, I am free of questions, of doubts about what I am. I am just a voice, an expression of thought.
In the everyday existence, it matters where I am from. I am okay with that. I don’t mind telling you. But it is exhausting when it becomes the only thing, the most interesting thing about you. And yet what would I be if not what I came from? I wouldn’t be so interesting, so intertwined and complex and tormented, would I?
Every year, it’s more unwrapping, more thinking, more getting older and trying to figure out what it is I am. I am not sure I will ever master either language, but I know that I will forever be tied to both. I will be tied to the ocean that separates me from my native land.