The night I left Tehran never ended for me. I didn’t know how to say goodbye then, and never learned 12 years later, even though I had to say goodbye many more times. After all the reunions, all the visits, all the temporary times I spent with people I love, saying goodbye never became easy, it only became an irritable habit, a bad wound that never healed.
Eventually your body dies, exhausted by the infection of the wound that never healed. Eventually, your mind needs rest. Eventually, you have to learn to say goodbye, and actually be able to let go.
My fear has always been the aftermath of loss. I don’t know how to cope with loss, with periods of life that end. For most people, it’s easy to move on, and they almost don’t have to think of it as letting go, but rather a moving forward, the next chapter. I live in chapters that don’t ever really end. And so it is hard for me to live because I am always fighting with the past and the future never seems to be arriving.
I am tired of goodbyes.

A few weeks ago my father dreamed he was walking up a hill and holding a little girl’s hand. This morning, my sister announced she is having a baby girl. I spoke to my father, congratulating him on being a grandfather. “I knew all along, before everyone else, that I would have a granddaughter,” he said proudly. Then he said something that I will never forget,”They are born, then they grow up, and then eventually have their own homes.”
And I thought of all the times he has had to say goodbye to his children, how many times he has had to pretend he is okay with all of our decisions, with how we’ve changed, with how we’ve grown up and no longer his little children.

This morning when I stepped out of the apartment, I smelled fall. It was the same smell when I was in Tehran and my mother walked me to school. It was a particular smell, somewhat sad because you knew that winter would arrive soon, and then there was the silence of those early mornings, a certain deadness surrounding the air. The hardest part was when my mother let my hand go, and I joined the rest of the girls in terribly dark uniforms in the school’s backyard. I always wanted to be a grown up even then because I couldn’t bare the childhood fears, the inability to escape school grounds, the inability to express emotions and feelings in any way. I didn’t yet know that growing up had its own loneliness.
On my walk to the subway this morning, I called my mother and told her about the smell. She immediately said, “the smell of fall.” I told her my new decisions, and she said whatever I decide is for the best. A sense of relief came over me, for I realized that even now as I stood alone, and no longer a child going to school, my mother’s words still made it all better. As if she had never left, as if we were still there on those empty streets, as if nothing had changed. And yet I knew that we had both changed, and that we were much better now, much more experienced, much more free.
I wished her a good day and walked down the steps underground to the subway, my lungs heavy with the smell of fall.

My friends compliment my father for being sweet. Though he rarely speaks, and when he does, he is so soft-spoken it is barely recognizable, he is accepted right away as a kind man. I call his quiet demeanor the sweet silence. Recently, as I see him continue to lose weight on each of my trips home, I often worry that I won’t see him again. He is always on my mind, as I make my way back to the city, as I trudge along New York’s rainy streets, as I remind myself I am loved by him.
In that sweet silence of his, I find the purest form of comfort and hope to forever remember it, this quiet loving.

On the day of Madar Joon‘s one-year death anniversary, my oldest brother took me to an art center, perhaps to spare his six-year-old sister another day of grieving. While I knew why everyone was spending the day at the cemetery, I took his hand as he walked me to the big building after we got out of the cab. He sat with me, or stood nearby as I and the other children drew by our instructors’ guidance. I didn’t particularly like any environment where I was told what to do, for in Tehran nothing was really fun even if you were just a kid. But I think part of me had wanted to be at the cemetery; I never liked feeling left-out. I was already too conscious of what was happening around me, even if no one really explained death to me. Even when my aunt gave me her religious understanding of it from the holy book, I knew I couldn’t depend on that to explain why my 92 year-old grandmother, who I had spent many afternoons and evenings with, was lying dead on her bed, her daughter Soraya sobbing at her side.
Seventeen years later, what I remember is that while everyone left, my brother and I stayed behind, and I watched the street from the living-room window. I never had a voice, but if I did, I perhaps should have said that instead of pretending things are normal, I too would like to be at the cemetery. I didn’t cry when she died, nor on later occasions when I did go to the cemetery, but I shared my family’s sadness, along with the unstoppable sobs of my aunt Soraya. It is the process of understanding that pertains to growing up, to helping a child understand that pain and loss are part of life.
Later in life, especially after our immigration, my parents continued to leave certain decisions unexplained, and it is now on me to try and move on and understand why things happened the way they did. This feeling is not so much different than being a child, only that now I have no one to hold onto for protection.

As she walked up the gloomy stairs of the subway station, dread filled her insides, for she realized that it was already dark out, and the colors of the sky had changed, and that fall had inevitably arrived.
Unlike most people who liked fall for its beauty, the changing of colors, like her mother, sister and a friend born in October, she associated it with sadness. She remembered all the miserable school days in Tehran, how fall marked the beginning of another dreadful year in a system she hated. The buying of the uniforms, and the seriousness that followed inside the classrooms, where she had to sit silently, arms crossed, obeying and never questioning what was said.
Here in New York City, fall also brought back memories of times she was alone, and struggling, as she was now in a different way, to settle in a place she had dreamed of being, becoming, and loving.
Everything about New York was a struggle, she realized. Without much financial support, in a way, sometimes it seemed impossible. She felt herself getting more tired by the thought. She was only 23 and yet reality had sunk in so deep that her skin had lost its youthful color and unattractive circles formed under her eyes, along with lines on her forehead.
What was it she wanted once? She realized she had just imagined a fantasy where by moving to a big city, as great as New York, somehow the wheels would turn and something would happen. That’s how she was, always looking for something to happen. She was good with change until it became routine. She didn’t know how to handle routine, for she felt stuck, unable to breathe, like on her morning and return trips on a crowded subway train.
And here she was on the street, trying to make it home as the grey clouds seemed to surround her soul. Would she ever figure out how to be happy? She wondered as she struggled to pick up her pace.

I carry a lot of nostalgia that my family doesn’t. When they left Iran, they left their memories there as well. They held on to nothing because their journey was about letting go; their survival depended on letting go. But for me, it has always been a journey of loss, not so much that I wish to return. But somehow, my childhood self yearns for those days for they were the purest form of happiness. Perhaps because I didn’t have to be perfect then, I didn’t have the flaws that I have now. I didn’t have to form a new identity. My identity, my language, my being was one, and it was never questioned. It was after immigration, however, that everyone questioned it. I questioned myself more than anyone else. And I as I type these words, I am still aware of the flaws that hinder the flow of my thoughts, the words that I use improperly, the rare occasions where I pronounce something with the wrong syllables, the only time I make a slight speaking error, where to the general public my English appears flawless.
Perhaps I took the journey harder than others. I obsessed not over perfection, but rather a self-improvement that I will never acquire for my standards are always too high.
And so remains within me a longing to accept this self, this existence that will never be ideal.

I closed my eyes and imagined I was in the Dining Room of my house in Iran. I picked a room that only now exists in memory, in a house that was sold years ago and can never be revisited.
I pictured the cream-colored walls, and the photographs and art frames, the books and decorations on the shelves and the window. The room smelled like antiquity, a good smell. From the window, the trees and the neighbor’s house were visible. There was a woman in that house facing our garden; sometimes we crossed paths on the street. We heard her loud screams every now and then, the high-pitched screams that startled us every time, and every day.
I picked that room because the last time I was there I was 10 years old, and possibly happy, though awaiting to see my father in the States. It is where I played games with my cousins, where we ate sometimes because it was larger than all the other rooms, where guests slept if they stayed over, where we had friday lunches or Ramadan dinners. I picked the room in which I kept my toys in a locked cabinet, for I shared a room with my older sister. The room where I spent most of my childhood days in, role-playing alone, and drawing on the whiteboard. It is where my mother embroidered, and sang in the afternoons while I read a book or colored my drawing book. It is where we sat together after her nap for tea snacks, and I watched children’s programs on television.
I sang, and though my voice shook with every dropping tear, I felt a relief, knowing that no one could take my memories away.
My voice teacher said, “Don’t run away from this. I know that your mother doesn’t cry, but crying is not a weakness.”