When I walk in, my mother greets me by saying how great it is to have a daughter, even if she is a runaway. For her, my life in New York is equivalent to running away from my family.
Cedar Lane hasn’t changed. The house is the same, just as leafy and green as before. I run on a trail that stretches about 3 miles. My legs cramp and my ankles ache- the doctor tells me it’s from dehydration and being cold. I like the trail because there aren’t too many trees, but just enough wide roads and nature to make me feel like I am away from the city and closer to nature.
The roads are constantly under construction, bridges are being built, and the metro slows down because of it. But people don’t change. They adjust. They leave a few minutes earlier, and come home a few minutes later, get to their cars and drive home. Underneath me, cars move in both directions, fast, and I run above, on the bridge, looking down under, wondering if they can make out what I look like. When I reach the end of the trail, the hill becomes steeper, I am out of breath, and because my ankles ache, I stop my jog and force myself to walk with a quick pace.
While at Cedar, I am at peace. Perhaps because by now my heart knows New York too well, and though my soul needs it, my mind needs the peace and quiet. The best thing about sleeping is waking up to the sound of nothingness, sometimes birds chirping, but even that is too delightful to complain about. I love looking at my room, much bigger than the one in New York, and seeing nothing but trees, leaves, branches, and our beautiful yard. There is so much beauty that I once neglected to appreciate. And now as I count my days at Cedar, I cherish the seconds, and wonder when my next summer of Cedar will be.
I say my goodbyes, and my father waves, always asking me to come back soon, always bringing me to tears. My mother hugs me tightly with her small frame, and I leave them on Cedar, and they disappear behind the leaves. It’s just me then, on a bus back to the city, my heart filled with new memories, part of me aching for an easier life, the other yearning for more excitement and change.

On our walks back from school, my mother and I used to hop together on the sidewalks sometimes. She didn’t care if people watched. In Tehran, we didn’t own a car so we walked everywhere, and rode buses often, cabs on occasion. Mom took me to my doctor appointments, my gymnastics class, my art lessons, and to the bazar or the small markets. I was often buried between long, dark veils inside the crowded buses. The women were separated by a metal bar so there was no chance to intermix with the men on the bus. Of course, the women’s section was much smaller and we rarely found an empty seat. I could never breathe, but somehow my mother held onto my small fingers and never let go. Sometimes she gave me treats, like the yummy hot donuts with the chocolate glaze or the plain sweet ones shaped like a telephone.
Now that I think about it, I realize that if we had a car I wouldn’t have seen as many things as I saw in my 11 years of walking in the streets of Tehran. All the different neighborhoods, the many shortcuts, the people that were just bystanders. I didn’t know then that one day those walks would become my only memories of the streets of Tehran.
My mother was always braver. She pushed me so high on the swing and with so much strength that I yelled and screamed for her to stop, almost in tears from fear. I don’t remember her ever appearing scared or fearful. She either hid it well or had no reason to let it take over. She was a housewife, an embroider, and had a natural talent for singing. She always knew where she was going, knew when to say no if I wanted something I didn’t need like an expensive toy. She signed me up for classes every summer. Her biggest mission was to make me swim. “Your older sister learned to swim at five years old,” she always said. We couldn’t afford a piano, but she put me in a music class anyway. I hated it, naturally, and quit after the teacher made fun of me in front of the whole class for holding the Orff sticks incorrectly.
When I was a bit older, I began noticing the age difference. When talking to classmates, I was always the one who had the oldest parents. Once, when Mom was peeling a pomegranate and emptying the seeds into a bowl, I asked her what would happen if she died, what would I do without her. I calculated how old she would be when I reached high school, and the number frightened me. “I am not dead yet, am I?” she asked, a clever smile forming on her face. I was embarrassed by my question, but I needed reassurance.
When my father left us for the States, I was eight. My mother says that after he left, I began picking at my fingernails, tearing them with my fingers. The crying also began, the sudden sobs, the ones that were loud enough for everyone to hear. It seemed like I missed him the most. No one else cried in my family, not my older siblings, not my mother. And if they did, I never saw. Mom got angry at me for missing him, not because I did, but because she didn’t know what to do about it.
It was then that my relationship with my mother became different. I got angry at her probably because I imagined she didn’t care as much that he was gone. If she ever missed him, I never knew, for she never expressed it. She was just so perfect all the time, I never saw a moment of weakness in her. But I was the one who was weak. I was the one who cried and had terrible moods, who didn’t want to go to school, and cried every morning, who had nightmares. And I’ve grown up still trying to prove my mother wrong. I still haven’t managed to be strong, though she would beg to differ.
I used to think that I loved my father more. I think I thought that it was the least I could do to make up for him being gone, by telling myself I loved him more. I wanted to fill the gap. We made phone calls for four years to my father, always counting the time difference, always planning ahead, always hoping we would join him soon. If there ever was a god in my life, it was during that time, for I needed to believe in something. When you are a child and your family is broken up, you can only rely on a great being, especially if that’s what the school system teaches you too.

On Friday afternoons my mother used to ask us to call for Madar Joon, Baba’s mother. My siblings and I took turns yelling her name from the third floor, looking down the stairs below, hoping she would hear us so we wouldn’t have to knock on her door. She eventually came up and we sat, the six of us, around a large table cloth on the ground, and ate my mother’s meal.
That was our Friday routine, all of us eating together. And that is all that I remember about us, before we all fell apart, before Madar Joon died, before Baba left for the States, before my eldest brother left for Europe, before Baba decided to send for us from the States. This is all I remember. And though everything that happened after was much better for all of us, I still miss that piece. I miss those Fridays when it was simple. When we were simple. I don’t know what any of us wanted then, but I was happy then. Perhaps I was too content in childhood bliss to know what the rest of my family wanted.
But that is what my memory holds: a family eating together in unison, under the same roof. I can never let go of what was then, and for that, it will always be a struggle for me to mentally move on, and free myself of the pain of loss that to this day brings me to uncontrollable tears, followed by loud sobs that come from deep within me.
Memory is a strong thing, and I have too much of it. The pain is only inevitable.
During the first year of immigration, I had dreams about Madar sometimes. She was the only part of my dream that spoke Farsi. Up until we moved to Cedar Lane, everyone who saw my room, said it was a museum, almost disturbing because there were family photos on every side. Too many faces to look at. I was trying to recreate my family for myself because I was alone and wanted things to be the same.
Eventually, when I realized they would never be the same, when I started having more important dreams like going to college and leaving Virginia, when we moved to a house, our very own, I tore the pictures down from the wall. But the emptiness that came with taking them down, the nostalgia of those days, the people that I never saw again, remain still.

I am still a prisoner of my own fears.
In high school, teachers struggle to make you understand how important your future is. They want you to believe in yourself, to strive to be better. They don’t accept idleness, laziness, and a lack of drive. They push you, and if they are good at their job, don’t give up. But even they can’t really promise it will all be better once you get out, that you will find yourself, that you’ll be happy. They only tell you the next big step, which is going to college, which for some of us was the first generation of kids going to college in our families. The rest of it, life, no one knows. There is no mental preparation for the rest of the road, after college, when you are still unsure of who you are and what you want. What you wanted in high school is most often not even close to what you want as an adult, trying to actually cover your bills and make rent. Maybe it’s better to dream in high school, because if we all knew the truth, and the uncertainty that comes with growing up, we would all quit not only high school, but life. Maybe that’s why no one talks about the realities of the future, not because they don’t know it, but because it would seem ridiculous to a bunch of teenagers who think growing up is the coolest thing ever attained.
When I was in my senior year, I was very hopeful. I liked my writing, and none of the things I worry about now like love and finding happiness, and finding something to do bothered me. I even wrote an essay about how free I was, how after the years of immigration and the expectations I had set for myself I finally knew who I was.
It’s been five years since high school, and not only am I hopeless, but I am very much still a prisoner of my own fears. By that I mean that I have not yet conquered them, that my voice still shakes and feels wobbly when it comes out of my mouth in public. I have yet to respect everything about myself. I have yet to love myself, with all my flaws.
On the subway ride to work, I look around at people, to try and see if this is where they want to be. If in high school, they imagined themselves as grownups riding the train to work in one of the most crowded, difficult cities in the country. If they imagined that whatever corporate job they had was all they wanted. I wondered if any of them had originally planned to save the planet, be a humanitarian, or simply a father or mother. I wondered how they defined contentment then, and if it changed at all, or if they even think about it as much as I do. I feel detached sometimes, on these wobbly, scary rides to work where I am not sure if the train is even connected to the tracks and wires, or we are just simply hoping we are going to get somewhere safely. I look into the darkness outside the train, at the graffiti covered walls far away, the tunnels that seem to be untouched by humans, and I don’t want to be anything. I don’t want to be attached to anything. I don’t want to be in the present, or in the past, or in the future, I just simply don’t want to be.
It’s hard to define things now because life is so uncertain, I don’t even know how I got here. How I got out of high school, and ended up in New York, and now nothing makes any sense.

One of the things I dreaded as a child was getting sick. Even a cough worried me because my mother disapproved of illness. She took great care to make sure I received all my proper vaccinations, and regularly took me for checkups. She served me healthy, nutritious food and any illness on my part would mean a failure on her role as a mother. She didn’t tolerate that kind of weakness, for she was a strong, sturdy woman and had lived through much in her life to be put down by a cold.
I remember when I had those terrible coughs, the ones that continue to grow loud until you are out of breath and wheezing, and I prayed that they would stop. My mother always took an afternoon nap, and though her room wasn’t close to the kitchen, she always heard, no matter how much I tried to subdue them. She yelled, in her sleepy, but intimidating voice, “Stop that cough!” And I would try to find, amongst the many medicinal herbs in the cabinets, a remedy to my unrelenting coughs.
The herbs we had were the worse possible kind for a child. There were no flavors, no choice of picking strawberry over orange, because these medicines were from the ground. They got the job done, but they made me nauseous in the process. It was usually after dinner when she would sit me down, and force-feed me with one I hated in particular, a warm, grey-color liquid that you swallowed.
When I got sick, which was often in childhood, and almost never in adulthood, I feared my mother the worst. It wasn’t a time to be cute, and want her to feel bad and sweet-talk you back to health. It wasn’t a time to cry and be silly, but rather to find a way to get better before she got angrier. These days when I tell her how she used to be, she laughs and throws me a you-are-exaggurating look. I suppose my reasoning is when you are kid, everything appears 10 times worse that it may really be.
To this day, I hardly get sick, and unless it’s a viral flu and contagious,I suppress it before it gets out of hand. I look at pills not as saviors, but as emergency remedies if I have terrible pain on occasion, and I never tell my mother. Once I asked her to buy me a big bottle of aspirin, and upon handing it to me, she said disapprovingly, “Why do you need this? This is not good for you.”
On occasions that I feel a cold coming, I find myself rummaging through the isles of the nearest pharmacy, buying all kinds of things to relieve pain and suppress a cold. So far, I have succeeded, and since I no longer live with my mother, I have no worries. I consult with my sister, who is a public health nurse, and she listens readily to my minuscule pains.
I thank my mother, however, for inevitably raising me to be strong, and to care for myself. When I call home, her voice is soothing, and she says she misses me. And I miss her. I even miss the way she was, and the way we both were once, a long long time ago.

When I was little, my favorite part of the day was when Baba called me from his office. I liked the few words we exchanged. He always sounded cheerful; I never heard a different tone, never anger, or boredom, or even sadness. He just sounded happy. We had a chair that was attached to a small desk, where we placed the phone. The chair had a cushion, but no back so we had it against the wall. Sometimes when he didn’t call, I dialed his number, placing my small fingers inside the holes that corresponded with the numbers, and turned the white plastic circle. I asked Baba when he would be home, and he always asked how my day was going. I held the phone close to my ear because he spoke very softly. I liked that he worked outside, unlike my mother who was always home, and that he wore a suit to work. He gave me a sense of safety, for I assumed he had a good position at work.
The first time I saw him weaken was when he began having trouble walking and in need of medical attention. He was always a fast-walker, but he began taking longer coming up the stairs. He lost power then, and as time went on and he continued to age, he was no longer the same. Even now, he is so fragile that every day and every minute I fear that I will lose him. I realized this fear at a very young age and never coped with it.
As children, we imagine our parents as immortals and it is this thought that gives us comfort. We wait with the anticipation to grow up and experience this immortal way of living. We want to be like them because they seem so in control of life around them. If only we realized earlier that the time of childhood is possibly the sweetest time, and for some of us, the most peaceful as we are lost in our imagination, and the lives of those we look up to seem infinite.

After midnight, the sky changes quicker. Watching the clouds form a vast a blanket across the sky from the rooftop is something I hadn’t done in a long time. There is a quietness about the early hours of morning that you never get during the day. The moon lights gently, the stars scattered like tiny dots of hope, and New York almost appears to be asleep.
I haven’t dreamed of anything I’ve wanted recently. I am not quite certain of the last time I felt alive. I breathe, I laugh, and smile on occasion, but nothing inside of me feels real. I catch sight of a few planes, and all I want is for one of them to stop for me, and take me away. Away from the nothing that I have surrounded myself with.
So much of New York used to wake something in me, like thoughts that inspired me to want to be something more. But now so much of it makes me tired of wanting. So much of it makes me unsure. There is so much of myself I’ve lost that I am not sure I can regain.
Sitting on a bench on the Brooklyn Bridge when it’s one a.m. used to make feel alive, or something like it. It made me want to start running with joy. But this time, I am just reminded that I am too tired to even walk all the way across. I am so filled with sarcasm that the words coming out of my mouth scare me.
In bed, I struggle to find a comfortable position to sleep. Different parts of me ache, my lower back, my neck, my head. I have forgotten how to breathe properly. Even when I sing, I use my throat when I should be using the muscles inside me.
Everything inside me hurts and I don’t know how to make the pain stop. Every morning I wake up at 7 and I immediately wish I had one more hour to not have to make my body work.
The body is destructible if you let it go.