A year ago, we moved into a new apartment in Astoria. It was winter and a fresh blanket of snow covered the sidewalks; I had just returned from London and was also new to the neighborhood. I remembered the feelings of moving to a new place: I have traveled and lived in different places for much of my life. The smell is something you learn to get used to, like a new car when it has that particular smell the first month. But the scent of uncertainty–for me as a traveling immigrant, it is something completely different. It is a kind of thing that is both frightening and exciting. You know that once again you are in an unfamiliar land, facing the familiar fears of uncertainty, of never belonging anywhere, of loneliness not only as a stranger, but as a migrant, as a writer.
When I was 10, my mother and I lived in Brussels for three cold months. There was that smell then too, but one less striking, less harsh. I was a kid then, and the sadness I carry with me now was not as present. I liked the new place. It was my first time out of Tehran, and the European lifestyle intrigued me. The way people casually carried themselves, the way couples kissed in public and everyone just seemed easier at ease. It was the first time I went to the circus, and the first time I tasted MacDonalds. The first time I saw a church and heard a language different than Farsi. It was then that I realized the world was bigger than I knew. It was then that I knew I would be traveling more. It was then that I realized I too could be a stranger, and out of my comfort zone as a 10 year-old. Then, I was okay with impermanence. I had no fears of leaving Iran, and the trip to Europe to this day is my favorite memory of being a traveling child.
There is with leaving, an emptiness. First, it is the physical like a room that becomes bare after you take out the furniture, the décor, the things that made it yours. Then, it is the emptiness you feel inside as you say goodbye to people, to objects you’ve become attached you, to a bird that kept you company. There is too, the notion that this won’t be the last time you feel and smell emptiness, there is that bitter realization that leaving is a permanent part of life, and that it gets harder as you become more attached, and as your feelings mature with age. There is the fear of not knowing how to cope with this now really strong emptiness. When you are eight, it is not so bad, for you are still less affected by reality. It is only hard that your father has left, and you are not sure how to cope with his leaving. But as a 23 year-old who has now experienced many goodbyes, and many leavings, the pain somehow has accumulated to be something like a monster, a heavy, atrocious apprehension.
The smell of leaving, that faint aftermath of your friend’s soft cologne that you forever remember as her smell, the smell of the hallway you spent a year walking its stairs, the smell of air right when you walk out the door and the wind hits your face, the smell of that first winter, and the last with which you leave, these smells are what become you, what become memories.

The hardest part about being 15 was I realized I no longer belonged to Tehran, my country of birth. It had been four years since I had left Iran, four years since I’d seen my siblings, four years after immigration. My mother and I both decided it was a good idea for me to go for a month in the summer after my freshman year in high school.
It was exciting, and my friends and teachers were all excited for me, knowing how long it had been, knowing it was a long, big journey. I fell asleep in the Iranair airplane, the final plane that would land in Tehran. I opened my eyes and found a plate of Iranian food in front of me, rice and some kind of meat. I ate it eagerly, I hadn’t even noticed the flight attendant bringing it over.
When the plane landed, everyone cheered and clapped. The city lights, my city lights shone. It wasn’t that I felt like I was at home, but knowing I could be back, knowing I had people waiting to see me, was sufficient. And at that time, I wasn’t yet dwelling on the idea of “home,” nor was I trying to redefine it for myself.
I spent a month observing my own country, and as my trip came to a close, I realized sadly that I would never live there again. That I wouldn’t want to. I felt helpless for realizing I was a stranger there, and that the freedom I lacked had suddenly hit me at the age of 15. I understood then why everyone had left, but it wasn’t enough for me to move on and let go. Then there was the guilt of having the previlege to be a tourist, to have the option to leave for good.
I left with a heavy heart. When I parted from my siblings, I cried so hard and so much that even while the women in the airport security searched me, their eyes cold, as they sat fully covered in black veils, I continued to cry. On the plane, I thought of my cousin, who I wouldn’t see again until eight years later. It was then that I decided I would never go back to visit, unless I had someone traveling with me. I couldn’t do the goodbyes alone.
I have not yet been back.

I learned as a child that happy moments are fragile. I taught myself to hold onto moments, single memories, all a million images now cluttered in my mind. Because people left and most often didn’t return, for they started a new life in America, time became an obsession. Time became so significant that the present almost vanished, it was only now the future I feared, the future without the people I loved, the future where I had to fill in their emptiness.
When my siblings and I reunited after a few years in Turkey, we spent two weeks together in Istanbul, in a cozy rental apartment. The place was in a good location, and we had a kitchen to ourselves as well. My Mom and grandmother took turns cooking, and it felt like we were back in Tehran. But we all knew that after two weeks my siblings would return to Tehran, my sister wishing she didn’t have to, my brother still undecided about America. We knew that my parents and I would return to the States, and I knew that I had a short time to be happy.
What I remember is that we drank a lot of tea, ate a lot of ice cream, for it was summer, and took as many photos as possible. We were tourists, so we learned the ways, took cabs, visited important places, and loved the beauty and scenery of Istanbul. And every evening, when the sun began to set, and the Azan (the religious chanting) from the mosque played from the loud speakers, a sadness took over me that I will never forget. It is that nostalgic sense that the day is over, and time once again betrayed me, reminding me I cannot hold on to it, that I have no control over how it moves, how it gives me less time to spend with my family.
But we had many laughs during our tea time. We loved that we could choose amongst the many flavors, like apple and cherry. We laughed because we always do when we get together, and with the difference in age, and the different generations there are a handful of jokes and memories to recount. My grandmother is especially fond of story telling, and occasionally she will surprise us with a humorous story, or even a dirty joke.
The two weeks were over, and my siblings had a flight a day before my parents and me. That night was one of my worse nights, for the apartment felt so empty, so dark, so sad and I couldn’t bare it. I cried, and upset my parents with my angry mood and my constant crying. I almost forgot that night, but now that I began writing I am remembering how much it hurt. That night changed the trip, and I couldn’t let go even after all the mental preparation, even after knowing all along that it was just a trip, and trips always end.
I always became angry after goodbyes. It was not in my hand, no part of my life felt like it was controllable. And the only thing I wanted was to not have to say goodbye so often, so many times. And yet they continue to be part of my life, they continue to hurt, and the amount of pain it causes me continues to baffle my mother, who has had the unprecedented ability to let go so strongly that I will forever envy her.

I don’t remember the first time my father left Iran, but I remember the time he left again after a six-month visit. I don’t remember the first time because I didn’t think that he had no intention of returning. I knew he needed to leave for medical reasons, which turned out to be surgeries. I knew that he wasn’t okay, that he had trouble walking, which for a man who always walked faster than everyone else, was a sign that something was seriously wrong. Or maybe it was the simple fact that I was eight and didn’t think a father would leave for another country and not wish to return.
That night I remember that everyone came, most of our relatives, and we gathered on the second floor. Our apartment had three floors, and each was occupied by relatives. We were on the third, so every gathering and occasion had its own proper meeting place.
I and the other children sat together, and the grown ups in the big dining room; though I could only think of Dad, and how little time I had left with him. He had an early flight the next morning. I was quiet that night, hardly laughed, like I was not there at all. I didn’t want to be playing games or acting silly. I wanted to have my father stay. I wore one of my more colorful scarves; it was white, but covered with green leaves and red and pink flowers. It was soft, and felt right on my head, and I had decided to wear it that night.
Then it was time to finally saying goodnight, for I had school the next morning and couldn’t continue to stay with the grownups. It was then that in front of everyone, I began to cry and couldn’t stop. One of my cousins took my hand, trying to hold me close, give me a hug perhaps, but I pulled away and ran upstairs to my room. I continued to cry before I fell asleep. I prayed out loud, for I knew no one would hear me. I said a lot of things, mainly I was asking God why he was doing this to me, why he was taking my father away from. And that I would miss him, a lot. I also wondered, at a later time, that perhaps if my mother had come upstairs that night, had comforted me, or had just been there, maybe it wouldn’t have been so unbearable. I should have realized that his leaving was just the beginning of a more serious change, that if my mother had really believed it was temporary, she may have comforted me after all.
The next morning my Dad hadn’t left. He’d missed his flight. I knew he needed to go, but I was still relieved, for myself. I had a few more days to spend with him. And though I cannot recall them, what was said between us, or how we spent it together, I know that those were the happiest days.
————————————————–
I came to Virginia for the weekend to celebrate my sister’s birthday. My father was especially happy, as if he hadn’t expected me to come. He repeatedly said how happy he’d become that I came, and hoped I would do it again. He still remains to be a fragile part of my life. I’ve never really felt like I had him, and I always worry that I will lose him. It’s like I will always remain the child who missed her father. It’s like a wound that won’t heal, and I imagine it is the same kind of wound that never healed for my siblings who spent many years without their mother.
When you realize people can leave, people you love like your father, your life changes. When you accept that people do leave, and that they may not return, you grow up. My life changed when I was eight, and I have been struggling since then to accept it. I haven’t grown up.

My father worked the night shifts at the 7-eleven, and one night he fell asleep behind the wheel, and had a fender bender. It was then that my mother persisted he find another job, one where he would not work the night shifts.
But car troubles continued, for we could only afford used ones. They broke down, one after the other, bringing everything to a halt. Nothing was stable. That, I learned to be part of immigration. The instability, the transience, the uncertainty of things, of ways of life, of the path we had taken on. For me, it wasn’t just survival. I hadn’t left a war-torn country, I hadn’t suffered, but only the absence of my father as he spent his first few years ill in the States, undergoing multiple grave surgeries. No, I hadn’t really suffered to be in need of survival. But rather, I was trying to make sense out of the new life, and to accept that I had to assimilate, that I had to learn English as perfectly as possible to fit in and belong. I had to figure out how to carry myself, how to dress, how to be. It may be too extreme to say immigration was like a rebirth. But then again, what I was 12 years ago bares almost no resemblance to what I am now.
The apartment complex began to make me sick, not physically, but mentally I wanted to get out of it. I knew we wouldn’t stay there forever. I knew my mother wasn’t the type to sit still and let it grow on her. She got her driver’s license, despite my father’s lack of support, and she changed her job, and she attended her English classes. She was my hope, my only hope that there would be a brighter future.
But it was a slow process. Too slow for a restless child like me. I had trouble in school, not because I was doing poorly, but because I was not good enough for myself. Even when I passed the test to move to a regular English classroom with native speakers, I knew I was behind. I knew I had taken a test to be there, and I probably never really gave myself credit to have passed it.
I never trusted myself to speak out loud in class, for fear of making a speech error. So I reverted to writing only, and unless I was called on, I seldom raised my hand.
It’s been 12 years now, and I take voice lessons, where I get to sing. But even now I have a hard time hearing myself. It is not an error of speech I am looking out for, but my voice itself that startles me. It’s been quiet for so long that now as I am trying to let it be free, it frightens me, and I almost wish for it to not come out. It used to embarrass me, my voice. And I must let it be free now, for it’s been silenced. It was in the first grade when my elementary teacher in Iran called me out on being too talkative. I learned to silence myself, and though the new country encouraged me to speak, I didn’t allow it.
It is easy to assume one is free in a democratic country, in a place where no dreams are banned. But when the soul itself has been imprisoned for a long time, when the person holding the voice captive is afraid to let go, one is not yet free.

So often in that apartment I wished for a private space to cry, to scream, to express all the frustration and anger I carried as a child, trying to be adult about my lack of English in an English-speaking society. Trying to learn that perhaps my childhood had ended abruptly, without me realizing, or anticipating it.
My writing craze started with an insignificant short-short story in Ms. Ford’s English class. Ms. Ford, who had stylish grey hair, who was tall, and loud and pronounced my name strongly, dragging it out like it was some mystical title of a foreign poem. The story was about a girl who made a mask for halloween, from what I vaguely remember. Ms. Ford encouraged me to edit it, and together we polished it until she decided it was worthy to be read out loud for the class.
I occupied my time at home, trying to perfect a language that seemed unreachable. I couldn’t express every fear, every anger to my mother who was struggling herself. My mother who had given up 50 years as a mother and housewife, to now be serving lunch at a high school cafeteria. And yet she was more free than I ever have been, but I didn’t know that then. She once told me the story of how she nearly cried when she left the cookies too long in the oven and they burned, and she was having a hard time explaining what happened to her boss.
The trouble with older parents, who are hard-working, and do the best they can for the betterment of their children’s future, is that if you are a mature child, you know that already. You are then reluctant to express the difficulties you are having for fear of appearing ungrateful. Of course, my unhappiness showed. My mother knew I wasn’t laughing; she’d caught me crying on multiple occasions. But she also never promised everything will be okay. And while we all grew out of the fear of immigration, and moved on with our lives, and became “successful” in terms of finding our comfort space, and becoming more or less who we are today, for the better, it never really was okay. At least not for me.
If I am still having a hard time, still searching for a “home” that doesn’t exist, for a perfect version of myself that doesn’t exist, for a permanence that I’ve always feared, then I have not been okay. Any time I begin to sense that I am staying somewhere too long, I get this ache to leave, and move, and change my external space, always under the false impression that with it my internal feelings will be at peace, will rewaken and break the pattern of constancy and boredom. There is something in me always wanting to experience, and I have formed this illusion that the more experiences I acquire, the more complete a person I’ll be.
Is the fear of permanence rooting from once learning as a child that there was no going back to the country of my birth? Is it that with impermanence I have at least the security of knowing I am not stuck somewhere, having to put up with the fears I carry with myself, a running away.
Maybe I’ve been running away for too long. And maybe it is time to face myself, the person I constantly run away from.

Perhaps it’s the natural instinct of an immigrant to want to make the new country his home.
Yet he continues to fail with every attempt because the birth country cannot be replaced. The definition of home becomes diffused, molded, and mended as time moves forward, and the immigrant grows in his new place. And what is home really, but a smell, a feeling, a memory, and we cannot recreate such precise elements. So the search for a “home” is not only impractical, but also simply impossible. The new land will certainly bring with it its own unique smell, feeling, and memory.
My first “home” in Virginia was on Arlington Boulevard. My feelings then, and now have remained to be a mix of anger and embarrassment, for the place never felt like home. It never felt like it was mine, like it belonged to my parents. It was a starting point, a roof, a space that lacked anything resembling what I had left behind. It was a like a long dream, where every morning I longed to be woken, and not in that space. But we lived, as any family did, by buying a few pieces of furniture, a rug that later I began to despise as well, not only for its poor quality, but its lack of elegance. We paid rent, or my parents did. We had plants, my mother did. And I slept where the dining room table would ideally be, and my parents in the one bedroom.
The smell I remember now, is a not-so-pleasant odor of the long hallways, the shared space of strangers, the meals they cooked, the meals my mother cooked. The memory of it is present in my mind, for I have a strong visual memory, but it is one I don’t like recalling, retelling, or even writing. But in order to move on, I must write it, and describe how I felt, and why it was so filled with sadness that even now it brings me to tears.
I was then 11, and spent my first year of immigration in a state of ignorance and impermanence. I asked my mother if we could return. I don’t remember whether I used “we” or “I.” But I made this point clear that I was neither happy, nor willing to pretend. She eventually broke it to me that there was no returning, that this would have to work, that I would learn English the best I could, that I was young, that Tehran had nothing to give to me, that I had nothing to give to Tehran.
I spent the first two, three years writing letters in that space, after school, at night, on weekends, whenever I found the proper solitude. I wrote my letters in Farsi of course, and addressed them to various cousins, and each of my siblings. The letters always began with “I miss you all,” and ended with, “I hope to see you soon, or I hope that soon we’ll all be reunited.”
And with this statement, I moved on, and ahead, my English improving, my social life improving, and eventually there were no letters, and the “reunion” took so long that it felt like an after-thought.

One school night, after I finished praying, my brother came saw me crying. I told him I didn’t want to go to school, that I couldn’t go. I was in the third grade, and couldn’t stand my teacher. She was one of those women who intimidated even a small ant. I don’t know why I feared her so much, but I never had a voice, let alone the ability to stand up to authority. I had learned to obey authority, not question it. My family was the silent type, though I learned much later they had rebelled in different forms. But somewhere along the way, I became that child who does as she is told. When my mother did not allow me to play with the neighbors’ children on our block because they were a bad influence, I accepted. I didn’t go behind her back. I didn’t rebel. I didn’t fight.
That night, my brother, 12 years my senior, tried his best to understand why I hated school so much that I couldn’t stop crying. I didn’t explain to him that every morning when she started the class with mandatory prayers, I felt sick because there was no air, and the silence of the classroom, filled with a bunch of eight/nine year-old girls was too depressing. That everything we did was a test. That every answer had to be right, and if you made a mistake, you were immediately heckled by the teacher in front of everyone.
Once a month we had a behavioral report card, which basically meant you would be graded based on your cleanliness, appearance, uniform, and your general attitude. I always aced those, because I was so polite and quiet. Once, I was wearing hoop earrings, they were small, but questionable nevertheless. The whole time I sat in my seat, nervous because I thought they would see my earrings and I would be in trouble. So I made the smartest move I could think of: I put on my headscarf. Since girls had separate schools from boys, we were allowed to take off our scarves in the classroom; there were no males on school property).
I cried most nights of the third grade. I think my mother thought it was because Dad was gone, which was true too. But most of it was the simple fact that I couldn’t be in that classroom.
The comforting thing about praying was I thought someone was actually listening. Those few moments were mine, and though they were trite, and upsetting, they were my minutes of despair. And then the worse moment was when I went to bed, dreading the next morning. Some nights, my brother read me stories. I was probably too old for stories, but they were a nice distraction.
The last prayer I had, as I hid myself under the covers, was “please God let tomorrow be a better day.”

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.