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.

My favorite part about living in Iran was that I knew little, and expected little. I liked our apartment. I never really wanted a house, though I sometimes wished I had my own room. I didn’t notice people aging the way I do now. My parents’ age didn’t worry me then. I was young enough that their age seemed appropriate. Time went by slow. I always wondered what it would be like to be a grownup. My mother filled the afternoon silence with her warm, magical voice that carried me to faraway places. When she sang, I was silent. I figured she needed the space to be hers; it was her only time to be herself, not a housewife, a mother, a caretaker.
I didn’t realize then that neither of us lived in a free world. But we were free; I in my childhood ignorance, she in her songs.
That’s what I miss, the carefree way she sang, how high her voice went. Her voice is shaky now; and she is almost too busy to break out in song. I take voice lessons, which makes both of us happy. I sing in English in class, but there are nights that my hearts yearns to sing in Farsi. I sing, and my roommate Jill listens with eager ears. And I almost always want to cry when I’m done.

He asked if immigration ever ends. I think he meant if you ever stop evolving into something new. I said no, it doesn’t end. If you are the analytical, critical, curious, stubborn, unrelenting type, you constantly change. You constantly try to be better. You constantly strive for perfection, for improvement.
I am now beyond improving my English. I am now trying to expand my experiences. I am trying to educate myself culturally, musically, historically. I am listening to music I haven’t heard before. I am more open to saying I have no idea what something is without feeling shame. It used to be that I would feel this great sense of shame, embarrassed by all the things I didn’t know, all the knowledge I lacked, all the things I couldn’t relate to. Something as minuscule as not knowing a certain television show made me feel stupid. If I didn’t get a joke because it was related to a cultural reference, I would get upset. I was frustrated that I had missed the cartoons my non-immigrant friends had watched as children, and could therefore now reminisce.
I don’t mind saying, that above all things, I am an immigrant, and I will remain one until I die. I can never be reborn. I can never go back in time, so it is inevitable that I remain an immigrant. It’s not a status, and it’s more complicated than simply an identity. It’s a characteristic. It’s intrinsic. It’s difficult; it never is easy. Obviously, the speaking becomes more fluid, and the capacity to understand and respond quickly improves. I never had an accent, so that never needed work. But even that, if present from the start, may loosen, or completely disappear.
This isn’t to say we all want to assimilate and lose everything we had from our previous lives. At least, that isn’t my goal. Assimilation is a complex term, and I think it gets misused often. Self-improvement, and self criticism do not mean you let go of your soul. They mean that you think more reflectively about who you are now in relation to your new home. Perhaps you try and read more to better your new language. You add a few friends who can practice this new culture and language with you, and who can also teach you. It is not that you forget your past. You can’t push a button and become something you are not. You simply adapt and expand your knowledge and your vocabulary. You become bilingual, and you deal with the duality of your identity, of your body, of your self. Your soul is the same. You love the person inside of you, no matter the language it speaks.
I am always reminded of how hard those first months, first years were. If I stop and think, I cry because I still remember how painful the shame was, how utterly lonely my world was, how impossible it felt to cope. It’s a good reminder now. I can remind myself of how much I’ve accomplished, and how far I’ve come. Certain songs remind me of that time, certain television shows, and movies. It was a dark time, and my mother remembers how I stopped laughing. I grew up, at 11 years of age, because I simply couldn’t bare the pain.
My immigrant soul still continues to search for more. The search for perfection may be futile, but the hunger for discovery is invaluable.

As children, all we wanted to do was become grownups. I don’t know what fascinated us with the adult world. Perhaps it was the simple fact that we wanted to be someone we weren’t. What we couldn’t have was what we wanted. Like all the times we begged for a certain toy, the one that was popular and always on television commercials. My mother was strict about spoiling me with toys. I remember crying for a toy, and still she wouldn’t give in. I guess now I am not as spoiled as I could have been.
Summers in Tehran were hot and long. As kids, time went slowly, sometimes so slow that instead of three months it felt like a year. It was also cockroach season, big, brown ugly creatures. Some had wings; we feared those the most. Summers were also the season of daydream, of hopscotch on the roof, board and card games, trips to the Caspian, making fires on the beach. Just as I do now, I suffered from boredom. My mother registered me for all sorts of activities and lessons, all of which I despised. But my boredom didn’t stem from wanting more. I didn’t know what more existed out in other parts of the world. I didn’t have anyone to compare myself to. Sometimes the things I wanted were as simple as wanting a house for my Barbie and Ken and their little son.
When my father left for the States, I was 8. That’s when things changed and I wanted us to be with him. I didn’t know what America was, or what it meant to the Iranian people, to my father. But I knew that I wanted him back in my life, and if that’s where he wanted to be, we had to be there too.
I am a 23 year-old adult now, and I probably have more than I ever imagined I could want. But now, I don’t know what to want. What to look forward to. As children, you look forward to a world you don’t know yet. It is that very ignorance and naivete that gives you excitement for the future, that leaves you dying to find out. But then you find out, and there is nothing else left. Instead, you reminisce the past and you want to remember what it felt like to be a child again .
What it felt like to experience those first moments. The more you experienced, the more you wanted more, more of the new, more of the same. Once you know what it feels, nostalgia develops upon the loss of that feeling. We learn to mourn after things we’ve lost, people who’ve left, people who’ve died. Because we know what it was like when they were there. We like change, and yet we can’t cope with heartbreak and loss.
It’s like wanting to be in New York. Then you live here, you get tired, and you know everything, almost. What’s next, you wonder. You’ve tasted it, and you realized it’s not all that fancy, not all that great.
I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up. It seemed like a good question while growing up. But now that I’ve reached that stage, it seems silly, stupid, redundant, and frankly, I have no idea. Maybe I never really knew the answer; I was just more excited to make one up. But my current state of bitter transformation has left me begging not to be asked.
Don’t ask me what I want because if I knew, I wouldn’t be so unhappy.

We Iranian runaways of the West live with nostalgia. The air we breathe is nostalgic. We’ve chosen to leave our homelands for the betterment of ourselves, our families and children. In our sleeps, we dream of the Caspian Sea. In our mid afternoon daydreams, we crave our mother’s tea and homemade jams. At the end of the day, when we wind down and remember we are in a different world and must abide by different rules, we call home. Though the conversations are brief at both ends, the voices are still soothing, reminding us that there still remains a bit of what we left behind.
I vaguely remember my last night in Tehran. I remember the cab ride with my mother. I was 11 years old, and right then I learned that the blurry city around me would disappear soon if I didn’t memorize it. The last picture I have of it, then, is a series of blurry images, street signs, shops, neighborhoods where Mom and I had walked by foot in summer heat and winter cold. I didn’t cry, but the sadness that came over me would last for years, a haunted sadness that I often feel, when I am alone and thinking about Tehran. The beginning sense of nostalgia that had not yet formed in my young mind, the sense of loss that had just begun to shape.
“As you get older you find out the place where you started out pulls at you stronger and stronger,” I read in a book. At 23, I am not pulled towards Iran. Recently, there is not much of me that wants to return. I know that what I had as a child, an almost perfect, ideal Tehran, with its warm summer days, and beautiful fall breezes, is no longer there. I know that I will no longer find myself there, that I will be an outcast, an American, a foreigner. What I long for are memories, and perhaps for me to replay them. But that, is just a wanting. The people I grew up with have aged now, some are gone, some away in foreign lands like me. We all left, and now, going back, there will be nothing to return to. I am only nostalgic for infinite memories, but I have accepted that nothing will be the same.

All good things come to an end. The summer in Belgium came to an end, without anyone of us realizing. We parted, only to return to a norm we had gladly left behind. And upon returning, we realized why it had been so easy to lock the door, turn the lights off, and fly.
There are times in the day that I think about the house in the meadows. When I drink tea, I picture myself back on the veranda, a semi-warm wind coming from the east, the sun rays caressing my shoulders. I think of Sheri, making crepes or washing the dishes or ironing, sipping her forbidden coffee. I think of Toufi, lost in her music, painting the rest of her new canvas.
I even miss the rapid, sudden rain storms. How everything changed as we sat, watching from the inside as the windows became wet and blurry. The taste of coffee during those rainy days was sweetly bitter, more satisfying than ever. And we were all together, as if we never spent a day away from each other, as if 12 years hadn’t gone by. Twelve years ago, America was so far away that we thought none of us would ever reach it. Twelve years ago, good things didn’t seem so short-lasting.
But. Good things come to an end.
When I was little, eight to be exact and my father left us for America, my dream was to recreate my family together once again. I sill prayed then, and in my prayers I always asked for the same thing: Please God bring us all together. What an unusual wish for a child, but at the time I felt it my duty. I believed strongly that if I continued my prayers, we would eventually reunite. Four years passed until my mother and I reunited with my father. But the family never reunited. We were broken up and every now and then, on occasion, summer or winter vacation, we’d try to get together. I wonder why I never became angry at God for taking so long and for ultimately not making my wish come true. Why is it that I still prayed, still believed in something that had no proof of existence?
Every chance I get with my family together, I try to remember the details. I look back at photographs and realize how much each year we change. How every time we meet, we’ve become different people and yet our personalities are recognizable. My mother is still stubborn and hardworking, my sister still hoping to run her own business.
This past summer we celebrated our sister’s wedding in Vienna, Virginia. We had waited for that day for years. The hours went by quickly, but I caught a glimpse of everyone, and decided I had never seen my family happier. We were all there, after years of living the broken life, and immigrating to our respective countries, cities, we were there all. And none of the circumstances, none of the troubles mattered.
Now, it doesn’t matter anymore where we are. We are family, and when we are together, we know how to enjoy ourselves. I am glad at least that I no longer have to ask God for something I know will never happen.

I think being happy involves proper training. If you will yourself to be happy, I think then it’s easy. You go on with your day, and no matter what happens, you are still happy, no one can take it away.
I am back to the city, riding 45 minute subway trains from Astoria, Queens into Manhattan. I have a book and my iPod, and when I get hungry, I nibble on trail mix nuts and fruits. I get comfortable and try not to think too much. There has been heavy snow lately, and normally I’d be angry and miserable. But I am okay with it. I walk slower and more carefully since I already fell once this week and scraped my knee. When I get home around 7 or 8, I make dinner and enjoy my new home. In the mornings, I try to make the perfect coffee and though I miss London’s coffee, I am settled with mine.
No one says you have to be happy everyday. There is no happy police to check on you. You just do it yourself, and if you don’t want to, so be it.
I’ve decided it’s best for me to not think about it. I am just going to live.

Sometimes when I am in the subway by myself, I feel cramped and suffocated. I don’t like looking at people around me because they instill a terrible fear in me. I fear that I will never find comfort within myself. I get sick thinking about how self-aware I am. I am constantly on the verge of crying on days that I feel like this. No one can help me. No one can understand me. My mother’s voice echoes through the telephone cord and I can barely hear myself as I try to swallow. She asks me what the matter is and it takes me a few seconds to pull it together and muffle something indistinguishable. My mother sighs patiently and says I should figure out what is wrong with me. I only say, I know mom, I know.
The past few weeks have been better. I spent a few days in Mexico, drank, ate and sunbathed in front of the ocean. I didn’t think of New York. I looked at the ocean and rejoiced in the new freedom I’d found. I remembered more of my Spanish and translated occasionally for my friends. I felt quite bonita since it is customary for men to remind you. My friend said she had never seen me happier. I thought of my childhood beach memories. I remembered why water made me happy. The three Canadian boys thought we were crazy. We told them we were just excited. We jumped out and ran towards the ocean in the dark when red flags were still out. One of the guys yelled, “are you sure this is a good idea?” We said, “sure it is.” The waves kept coming and we only laughed harder.
When we landed in JFK I wasn’t quite happy. The city was loud and I had not slept in 24 hours. I sat in a cab and closed my eyes until I got off at Penn Station to catch a bus home.
It seems to me now that I am always traveling, always on a bus, or a train. I have met so many people, so many strangers and I never forget their faces. It is better to travel than to sit somewhere and remind yourself of your troubles. At least, that’s why I do it. I temporarily run away from my problems and tell everyone else that it is for the experience, the joy of eating exotic food and European coffee. And it is always harder to return home, to return to my routines, to find myself again and take on the path that is always uncertain. Though traveling involves more uncertainty, there is always the excitement, but the daily life involves more responsibility, more thinking. If I could travel constantly, I might have picked that as my life. Sometimes, I rather just stay. Like right now, I almost rather stay here in London. But then again, who wants to start over? How many times can one start over? I don’t know what it is, but there is something in me that always wants a challenge, a different experience. I easily tire of one place and I find it hard to change my circumstances.
I never thought that I wouldn’t know what I wanted from life, but the truth is that I don’t. I am 23 and I have time, but I almost wish I knew right now what I wanted.