If you stretch out your arm, you can hold the city in the palm of your hand. If you look to the far end of the water, you will see a blur of the flickering city lights, a blur of everything you ever wanted, everything you ever dreamed of. The desire is absolute; the dream is an illusion. The magnitude of the water makes you forget yourself. You are a whisper in the glaring night; you are an illusion of your dreams. You are light, empty, floating. Then, you feel the heaviness of the wind, and you begin to sink in what is no longer a delusion. You sink in, with your thoughts, your dreams, your desires of all that is left above the deceiving, shallow waters.

I am on a Ferryboat with my companion, sightseeing, imagining myself as a New Yorker, searching for a sign. There are others among us, but I am my own dreamer, lost in my own misery. I am happy in this boat. Miserably happy to be left with nothing but water, a mild wind, and a city that always glimmers from afar. Not too long into the ride, I lose myself. And suddenly, I can hear nothing. I can feel nothing, but a deep urge to stretch out my hand, feel, touch and breathe the perfect miniature of New York City.
The realization, the awakening, the process of losing and becoming, of accepting and letting go all happens in fleeting moments. I realize, that with all its vastness and magnitude, with all its immensity, I can hold the dream in my hand. I can feel its vibe, its beating heart, its every wall, and its concrete, metallic frame. Knowing that I can hold it all in the palm of my hand awakens my dead soul. I wake to become, not a dreamer, but a believer, in solid ground, in unison with the city. I wake to become myself, a writer, an optimist. I breathe, accept the current state of being and let the dream go. I let it go because I know I have it, at any moment, at any time. I let it go because it is and will always be mine, on this page, in my head, in my heart. It is mine.
Sometimes you have to let go in order to become. Sometimes you have to take a few days, throw yourself on the dirty streets of Manhattan to know what you want. Sometimes you have to be selfish so that one day you will give to others first. Sometimes you have to believe without calling yourself a fool.
I woke up this morning, feeling nostalgic, remembering yesterday’s ride back home, remembering that morning’s gloomy sun. S and I had taken one final look at our cheap, shabby room. Outside the tiny window, old garbage and opened trash bags covered the ground. The compressed air stank of mildew and rotten food. But above the filth, above the cage-like windows, the clouds were a lively white in what looked like a watercolor painting.
As a writer, as an optimist, as a believer, you see both sides of every picture. You accept not only its authenticity, but also its dense surreality, its imperfections. You work past the flaws, past the imperfect brush strokes to get a sense of peace and satisfaction.
I can hold a perfect picture in the palm of my hands. I can let go of my fears of its imperfections. I can let go of the misery that I have put upon myself. I can wait to solidify my writing and myself. I can put myself out of ignorance. I can learn to let go of great expectations.
The city awaits, and so do my dreams and a million other stories.

As I lower myself into a nearly filled bathtub, one I had difficulty making, it suddenly hits me that life on the outside is too dissatisfying.
But the realization comes later, much later…
I wanted, more than anything, a glass of wine. I wanted a Hollywood moment, sipping red wine, drenched in soap and sadness like Bridget Jones. Oh, the possibilities.
There was no wine. In our house, wine is implied to be a forbidden drink. Maman is a liberal who gave up most of her faith, but never dared sip the forbidden, sinister wine. Baba, well, he is Baba, the man whose silence empowers the rest.
There were no bubbles in my poor excuse of a bath, but nevertheless, I got satisfaction, preparing for a few moments of peace and nothingness, wordless soundtracks, and harmless daydreams. I decided to float for a bit, think. But the thoughts became more depressing that I had intended for them to be. In my thoughts, I was a dissatisfied, indolent child, uncertain of all that I once believed to be certain. I used to believe I’d never be doubtful again.
Merde…
In thinking, I despised my very being for how useless, futile it had become, for its unwillingness to accept and settle. Accept the uncertainties that, for the moment, I have no control over. Accept the uncertainties that a 19 year-old child would go through. Accept that I am now faced with too many roads and would, by any means, question and doubt certain matters. Settle for a low-paid job to make it to the next big thing. But what do we get out of settling, of accepting when there is always more to devour, more to understand, more to become? What do we get by letting time go?
I am not willing to let time go. I am not willing to drench myself in a stupid, bubble-less bath, feel pity on my soul for being overtly pathetic. I am not willing to watch myself tear every single fingernail because life isn’t good enough.
Merde…
It’s a pity to have a pen in your hand, only to let it consume you, beguile you into some fantasy world of ideologies, coffee cups and provocative reads, sexy, but costly red shoes and fancy hairdos. It’s a pity to think you have reached too far for your age when your body and mind is slowly deteriorating from the unfairness of the world…
Get real you fool. Get real, stop wandering. Stop wondering of New York and its ambiguities. Get real, work with what you have, at this moment, and then find your way. The city is there, will always be there. You’re ready. All you have to do is figure things out. Figure out what you want. Figure out what you can offer, what can be offered to you. Talk. Stop thinking for a moment about all that you are ignorant of. You are young. You are working to get there. Just, wait.
A teacher once wrote to me: “Take a year to unwind, untangle, unearth. Then move to the world that waits for no one but needs someone like you. You have options. Take them.”
I am ready, more ready than I ever felt before. I just need someone to tell me everything will work out. I need some answers. And a little more time.
Shit…

Morning skies have a different tone, a different style than night skies. Morning skies are uncertain, ambiguous, both with and without the presence of clouds. They make little sense, bounding you to search them, look and inspect to figure out the day, the time. It’s anticipation that fills the morning skies when you head out in complete unawareness and uncertainty, in doubt, even ignorance. You are lost even before the day commences.
Writers think, or else they wouldn’t write. They look for meaning. They like to analyze and decipher even the smallest things, the smallest ideas. The idea of happiness, the idea of love, the idea of being one with the universe, the idea of falling for someone. Everything, even the morning sky in its utter abstractness, has to be understood.
Understanding requires thought. Thinking requires sanity and devotion to time. Time can drive one insane. Insanity can lead to a deep urge and desire to let go of it all…
And so the writer looks for a distraction, a temporary breather, a stopping point, a comma.
*
In a gloomy, reddish sky, I wake to find my body asleep, hard, paralyzed and fatigued. I wake to find myself thinking; it’s the thinking that wakes me up. My day has not started and my mind is already thinking, way ahead of me. I need something, so I grab a sweater, dash for the bathroom, splash my face with water, and there, peace. I am awake now. Already thinking.
The morning skies are a curtain of awakening colors that make you think the day will go by in a breeze. But at some point, you will push the curtain aside to peek at what’s hidden because you are curious. You want to know everything. You want to know what’s out there. You want to see.
I can’t look at the sky and not think of my existence in relation to it. I can’t just look. I have to think about it.
What more can I be?
What is my happiness?
Who am I?
The desire to know and to be understood by everyone who misunderstands is a killer. I am misunderstood and I do not know how to make them, those who don’t understand me, understand. And in thinking, there are always more flaws, more gaps that I find within myself. In thinking, there are more reasons for dissatisfaction, for unhappiness, for misery, for loneliness, for isolation. In thinking, there is danger, fear, all of which constitute an abstract idea.
I get tired of ideas. I get tired of thoughts. I get tired of everyone who misunderstands my silence and my rampant thoughts. I get tired of wanting to understand the abstract, the idea of what makes life. I get tired of waking up, thinking. I get tired and suddenly, I don’t get myself anymore.
At 19, I learned one thing that released me temporarily. I found a breather, a comma in between my train of miscellaneous thoughts, my desperation to lead myself out of ignorance and mediocrity. I learned to take over the wheel.
I had no fear for the first time in my life. I have lived with fear ever since childhood. I have lived with the fear of being misunderstood. I have lived with the fear of being wrong. I have lived fearfully. I learned to let go of that fear. When you take over the wheel, there are too many things to be afraid of. There are people and cars and bikes and a whole world that is rushing by you with time. If you let fear get to you, you will lose control. You have to stop thinking while you drive because the road will show you the way.
The wheel is not just independence. Independence is a broad term. Independence is American life; it’s dreams that are not out of reach. It’s not just power. Writing is power, thinking is power, being who you want to be is power. It’s not just the adrenal running in your blood. It’s more than that. It’s freeing yourself from fears that hold you back. It’s freeing yourself from thoughts, from ideas that are too conceptual to be made concrete.
I love being free for that moment when I hold on to the wheel and let myself go. I let my thoughts disperse into the roads and I make no stops to gather them. I love being free of my fears. I love feeling good, as a driver, not a writer. I love being a driver for that moment, and not a writer who is desperate to figure things out.
Some things are meant to be unwritten. Some things are meant to be unanalyzed. As a writer, you pick at those things because you are stubborn and you have nothing better to do. You pick at your coffee cup and the spoon that stirs the sugar. You pick at your belongings. You pick at yourself. You are too damn stubborn. As a driver, you sit back, simply to drive. You turn up the sound of the music that makes you drive faster. You enjoy a breeze, every second or two. You are at peace with yourself. You don’t criticize the very soul you live in. You don’t expect that soul to understand everything that happens on the road. You don’t pick at your fingernails. You don’t question. You just drive and in that moment, nothing else has to make sense.

Starfish kicks as Jean eats her last bite.
This is one of those realities I never thought of, one of those realities I never thought I’d write about, be a part of, think of even.
I am spending a day with Jean, the soon-to-be mother of 20 who is already living a life. She touches her belly and feels him kicking, swimming like a little, playful fish.
It’s one of those realities that I could never handle, and yet envy, just a bit.
Jean is like an older sister who teaches me things my own sister wouldn’t. She has seen more of this world, more of its realities, its dramas and accidents. She has lived the American way, leaving her family and her California home, going after her dreams, falling in love, achieving more than one could ask of a girl so young.
I am like a lost puppy around her. I have the wrong reactions, the wrong answers. Sometimes, I have no answers. Sometimes, I don’t even make sense.
Starfish is a reality that I cannot envy. Motherhood is one I will always envy. Motherhood is a reality many mothers escape. Motherhood is powerful; it’s more than an idea. It’s unexplainable. It’s Jean loving Starfish already as he moves in her belly. It’s loving the thing inside of you, your other, your own. It’s loving all of yourself and all of Starfish and all of what makes the two of them you. It’s complicated.
I wonder what it’s like to be Jean. To have the power to walk away from everything that wasn’t real before. I wonder what it’s like to feel another heartbeat. I wonder what it’s like to love Starfish, sing for him, name him, call him and have him call you Mommy.
Maybe I envy because I see Jean and she looks ready. Maybe I envy her fearlessness as I hide in cowardice.
You can’t get more real than Starfish. You can’t get more real than a baby you may name Noah. You can’t get more real than a sonogram, a heartbeat, little toes and feet.
I part from Jean and her Starfish. At home, I make myself a cup of tea, turn up my music, and that’s reality for me…

Winds blow and the branches sway, the leaves falling violently, leaving us in bitter turmoil. The scene is surreal; we are disillusioned, disoriented. The winds push us back, and it’s hard to move forward, to push past the force.
And we are wanderers, dreaming. The winds change us, change the world.
We pray for those who are now gone with the wind. We pray for those whom we lost, for those who lost us, for those who lost each other.
What is left is more than sadness, more than a heavy heart. What is left is a bitter, unbearable, heavy silence. A silence stronger than the winds of time. Heavier than the forces of nature.
How do we move against these winds of time? How do we find our way back? How do we stop these violent winds, these painful drifts?
There is too much loss in our world. Too many winds. Too many fallen angels. And what we are left with is our troubled minds, our grief, our sorrow. What we are left with is heaviness and a loss for words.
Sometimes, even words can’t break the silence.

I don’t know what’s harder to accept: the fact that we have not yet seen a trace of real spring, or that at 19, I am still a stranger to Maman and Baba.
Or perhaps they are both equally hard to believe.
Our Sunday was soaked in a hard, constant rain that has only now broken off. Baba and I had tea together on the sofa. I put on French music for him because, like me, anything French makes him happy, almost content. Then again, he has always been a content man, or so I have believed him to be all these years.
Raphael, who sings Caravan in his charming, boyish voice, fills our silence. It’s the kind of silence that has become bearable, routine, a mutual understanding between two strangers who love each other. Sometimes I break the silence off. I tell Baba about something I haven’t told him before and he responds depending on his mood. Sometimes he jokes and is happy for no particular reason and we laugh together like children who are not in need for reasoning. Sometimes he is too quiet and the spark is gone from his tired eyes; on those days I don’t attempt to break the invisible wall between us.
Lately he brings sliced apples into my room and I feel a hint of hope. I hold on to that spark of hope so that I don’t lose what we have.
He solves word puzzles in between his five-minute naps on the couch. I think he has improved. I am sitting next to him because I like his presence, I like the smell of his cologne and aftershave; I like his stripped shirt and the oversize white socks. I like how he concentrates on the word puzzle without blinking an eye, tightly grasping his blue pen, pressing it into the paper forcefully. When I was in elementary and needed Baba’s signature, he would press the pen so hard that you could almost see a hole where the signature was. To this day, I prefer his solid, firm signature to Maman’s formless, barely readable one.
In the end, we are back to where we were before. Baba in his world of contentment and acceptance, me in my world of dreams. We are a world apart, but no longer by oceans. We are together, even when our thoughts are worlds apart. We are together, even as strangers. I can reach out to him and hold his hand. He can reach out to me and hold mine. And as strange as that might be, as obscure and ambiguous our worlds are, we will never have to endure the tumultuous waves that once separated us.

I miss the sun. I miss the unreasonable happiness, the contentment, the satisfaction of morning sunshine, my missing peace.
So I bury my head under the covers, and stare at my ceiling, thinking of nothing. And I wake up, not wanting to, only to pass the time in languor and laziness. I wake up to be yet awakened by a cup of coffee, the one thing that brings a smile to my gloomy, sunless face. I then realize that I have yet to finish readings or papers, that I have yet to do the week’s laundry or empty my room of dirty clothes or take out the trash.
I find 19 to be an age of excuses, of irresponsible, immature acts, of mishaps that are finding their ways in. I find 19 to be an unbearable time line, a border between freedom and mature responsibility. I find 19 irrelevant to my needs, dull and bland.
Sleep is becoming the only great part of my days. I get to sleep without being. Without the thoughts. So I sleep and everything else is whatever.

Chimes ring into my ears as I take the last sip of my coffee under the shade of a leafless tree. And the sun warms my back and everyone is busy, moving with the pace of time as if the world is about to come to a stop. Cigar ashes, under my foot. And dead leaves from the violent winds of winter. And the lazy air that puts me to an erotic spell.
The chimes are forks and spoons, tied to a string, hung from the empty branches. The wind blows my thoughts away, liberates me from internal pain, and makes me too satisfied with my current state of being.
I have stripped myself away from my shoes and the chains of winter. The boy who spoke, not too long ago, in French walks past me and I am sleeping to the sound of bells and sunshine.
Call me a fool. But a happy fool who lives by simplicity, sometimes lazily and selfishly, always looking for satisfaction. Call me an idiot who believes despite the odds. Call me pathetic. And I will still sit here with an empty cup as the wind blows my newly dyed red hair from east to west, as the sun melts me and deliberately shuts my eyes, because I can. I do it because I can. Because it makes me happy and because it makes me believe that soon I will have what I have dreamed of for so long.
If you tell me I can’t have it because the world doesn’t work that way, I will say you are the fool. I will say you are the idiot because the things you want are right in front of you. Because you are blind and you think everything is difficult when it is too fucking easy to have it all.
So don’t call me pathetic. Don’t call me a fool because you are only fooling yourself.
Take off your shoes and feel the ground with the sole of your feet because it’s good to live without rules. It’s good to drink ridiculous amounts of coffee and listen to music with high volume.
And while you do that, I am going to sit here and watch those who rush because they have bounded themselves to compete with time…

On the other side of the ocean, the first day of spring marks the beginning of a new year. The Iranians celebrate the renewal of life with the arrival of blossoms and the awakening of animals, the flight of birds, the swarm of butterflies, the sound of ice caps breaking, and the rivers running.
The families gather around a table of seven ingredients that symbolize the New Year, Norooz. An apple is a symbol of health. A mirror reflects faces, the world and the good that will come. Painted eggs are the existence of life on earth, the birth of animals and man. A fish symbolizes life. And so on.
As the count down begins, elders prepare to reward their grandchildren with money. Once the New Year is announced, family members hug and kiss one another, saying “Eid mobarak”.
The children receive their gifts and collect their bills. And the celebration goes on for two weeks. During this time, relatives meet and celebrate the beginning of a new year with sweets and colorful flowers.
Mamanbozorg bought a gold fish today to complete the table. The fish died on the way home. So now there is a dead fish in the little glass water jug, its eyes wide open, its body still, motionless. No sign of life. The greens or sabze have grown a couple of inches tall, tied with a red ribbon.
Maman was in class when the New Year came. Baba was napping on the couch and Mamanbozorg was eating her dinner. I was watching television, unaware of the one celebration that meant everything to me once.
I have forgotten the jitter and excitement, the way I used to stay up late before Norooz, helping R make the decorations for the table, painting the boiled egg shells passionately with bright colors and flowery designs. I have forgotten the happiness of those days that seemed like yesterday. Yesterday when I was 8 or 9, not a writer yet, but a little child, excited that I would get new shoes and clothes for the New Year. Yesterday when every member of my family was present at the table, thinking that we would be the same for eternity, together as a family. Yesterday when I knew not of freedom or the ideal happiness or the power of words. Yesterday that seems like a decade ago.
Time changes you. Changes the way you feel. The way you remember things, little things, like painted eggs and the fish that come and go every Norooz. I remember the fish. They would last a week or two after Norooz. I would watch them swim from one side of the tiny jug to the other. And I felt sorry that they were not swimming freely in the sea. That they had no freedom. No power.
With time you learn that your country of birth was a prison for many. You learn that people close to you were once revolutionaries who changed what Iran once was. You learn that freedom is not a privilege. You learn that there are secrets and hidden truths beneath the smiles of those you love. With time, you become ambivalent of what is right and wrong, of what is true and false, what is a fact or opinion.
Time changes you.
I am a writer today and my greatest achievement is the words on this sheet. I didn’t fight for my country. I never saw the revolution or the monarchy that killed loved ones I never met. I came into the world when bombs tore the streets of Tehran apart in an eight-year war with Iraq. I left that world with a hesitant, incomprehensive farewell to a brother and a thousand little memories of the pieces of Tehran.
And time changed me. I became a writer in a world of freedom and gold fish that freely swam. I lost much. But gained more in return. I kept Tehran in my heart. But I forgot certain smells and feelings. Like the smell of Norooz and its excitement.
Perhaps one day, I will remember again. For now, I must retreat back to the room, hug Maman, Baba, and Mamanbozorg, and wish them a happy year, wish everyone a good year, here and there. It’s time.

After a sleepless night in San Diego, we wake up by Maman’s knock. It is 4 a.m. in California. And we are getting dressed, or grabbing onto whatever is in front of us. The water is too dark and nothing can be seen but the flickering lights from afar.
I leave a note for the maid on my bed. It’s my fourth thank you note to a stranger who cleans the rooms, washes the sheets and changes the towels. This one is named Eileen, or so it says on a picture frame on the desk.
The flight to Chicago was simply uneventful. We sat Mamanbozorg by the window so she wouldn’t be close to the flight attendants, asking them for water. Maman read more of Gatsby and Baba did nothing. Looking out to the clouds was no longer a joy; I was too sleepy.
Here we are now in the Chicago Airport, eating and napping and letting time pass, awaiting the 4 p.m. flight to the city for lovers, Virginia.
Mamanbozorg prays and I have no idea what she asks from God. But whatever she has asked for so far must have been well because we made it through this trip, happy, satisfied, even if sleepless.
That’s it for this trip. Good times.