The New York of my dreams was something I had created at the age of 13 or 14 when my eyes first fell upon the city. I remember it being an extraordinary image. I was a native of Tehran, so it wasn’t that I had never seen a city. But it was something about it that caught me, seduced me, made me want to grasp it. I pondered about it in day dreams. I began to dislike the comfort of Virginia, the wide roads, the big grocery stores and the many trees and natural parks. I began an obsession fully at the age of 15 when I realized my imagination worked better when we drove to the city for a few days every summer. I began to believe that the only place where I could truly write was the city. I developed a tragic sense of nostalgia for the city and its blissful grandeur, its rambunctious streets. I began to live in the dream of one day obtaining life in the city, a life of my own, a life where I would separate from my mother’s and father’s dream. To me, the two of them had established a comforting life as immigrants. They had given their youngest child the opportunity of a life time: the American dream. They had established themselves as working citizens who paid their bills on time and taxes. I wanted my own dream, now that I no longer struggled with my being a bilingual. I especially wanted it because there was nowhere better than New York. Everyone in my family knew it would be hard to attain and they admired my stubborn, passionate efforts.
In a way, I came to New York without any objections. I came without any terrible hardships. I worked hard as a student, had a dream, knew how to write and it all worked itself out, though it required much patience on my part. At 21, I already had access to my dream. I lived it fully. I worked, went to NYU, worked on my writing, experienced night life, met strangers, met friends, and created a new persona. I struggled, just as anyone else living with student loans and not a lot of cash does. But I did it by choice and the end result was worth it.
I am here still, 22 and living quite the same. Nothing is extraordinary anymore. I am sort of tired, buried in readings, still a year to go with school. New York is utterly beautiful but I feel not much for it. I barely see it even. I spend most of my hours reading, drinking coffee and staring out the window from my warm room. Delightful, the view, but I am unhappy. Many of my close friends and family believe something is wrong with me, that I am being ungrateful and selfish. They no longer know how to comfort me. They are bored with my self-deprecation, my inner misery. I am not happy with myself and I don’t think the city is at fault. I am on a path to an uncertain, but perhaps great future. I am unprepared and my knowledge of the English and American literature seems insufficient to me, for I still feel that 10 years of American living has not been enough.
This kind of writing is trite and dull, but I have to figure out how to be. How do people learn to be? How do they satisfy themselves and appreciate what they are. I am not what I want to be. Is anyone?

My mind travels a thousand miles away, always wandering off to foreign lands, foreign sounds, and foreign destinations. I don’t follow my mind. I let it wander on its own, but it trips me up, it turns me upside down. I get upset, remember that once again my mind has taken a turn on its own, without taking me along.
The city feels the same sometimes. Sometimes, it is so grandeur, so grand and abstract, so bizarre, that I don’t see it. It sees me. It takes me. It follows me in my head and takes over me. I ponder, lost, sad, because I am confused. My mind travels a thousand miles away, the city takes over what is left, and there you have it, a lost soul.
I don’t know if I always felt like this, though I remember the boredom of not knowing what to do with what I desired to feel. I longed to feel something. I longed to feel like I was running with impossible speed, as fast as my mind travels now. I didn’t like comfort and the satisfaction of knowing I was safe under my parents’ roof. I wanted to feel adventure, danger, some kind of thrill.
It was scary just imagining the city taking me hostage. But I longed to be taken. And so it happened. I turned 21. I grew up a little and went for it and here I am, lost, my mind traveling thousands of miles away.
I am wondering (how dare I) about London. What is London like? And what about Japan? Another adventure. The possibilities, the lights, the…
It never ends, this thirst for more. And I’m afraid, it still leaves me sad, because I am never really where I presently am because my mind has already left me.

I liked the smell of shoe wax in our hallway. Everyone waxed their shoes and I had learned to do it and enjoyed the particular sharp scent. I also liked putting shoes in order, like when guests came and they were on top of each other and disheveled, I would rearrange them and make them look neat. It was a thing to do; I was pretty bored at that age. My mom told me there is a saying in Farsi where if your shoes land on top of each other on their own as you take them off, that means you are going on a journey. I liked the idea of traveling and we generally did travel a lot. So when my shoes didn’t land on top of each other, I would do it myself. Sometimes, I did that to all shoes, which made everyone laugh. “Guess we are going on a trip!” I’d say, amused with wishful thinking.
My favorite moments were the nights before a trip, when we had a time limit to pack and get everything ready. Our trips were usually road trips to the Caspian Sea, where the beach was. So the trips were most often in the summer when Northern Tehran was humid and hot. That’s the only thing I didn’t enjoy, the extreme humidity. But I loved packing. I could never sleep the night before being filled with too much excitement. I’d still be awake at dawn, and the skies would be dark from our bedroom window, and a certain sadness would linger over the buildings from afar.
I liked that we were all together- my family and first and second cousins. We were inseparable. When we traveled, we always went together. We played card games and “esm va famil” (Name and family) where you pick a letter and everyone has to come up with names, last names, foods, cars, body parts, flowers, etc that started with that letter. Whoever finished first would say “Stop!” and then would read it all out loud.
I just remember being really happy, really excited. I loved when we all would get together in my cousin’s beach house and just laugh uncontrollably. That happens, when you spend so much time together and when you are all there to have fun, there are so many silly little moments of laughter. And the best part is, you can repeat them by retelling the story over and over, and then you laugh even harder.
But I hated returning home. I hated the last nights, where everyone naturally became quiet because we knew we’d have to go back home and get back to routines. My younger cousins and I didn’t want to go back to school and exams. And our parents probably didn’t want to go back to work. I learned nostalgia at a young age- I didn’t know it obviously, but that feeling continued returning over the years as people came into my life and left and things changed and weren’t the same, and then I learned about nostalgia in books and movies…and then I realized I already knew what it was. I never dealt with it either. I either got sick in the car on the way home, or later when I was older, I buried it in my throat and it hurt and sometimes if I were lucky and alone, cried it out. Even then, it still lingered, that ugly, nasty feeling of emptiness, of looking around a room and seeing it missing something, someone.
I like my childhood memories. They taught me to laugh and they were probably the happiest that I have ever been because I was satisfied with what I had. It was only later, when I lost things and gained more, that I learned of dissatisfaction and began building fantasies so grandeur that I lost the sense of natural happiness and contentment that I had once known so well.

I used to pray as a little girl. I used to ask him that all I ever wanted was for my family to be together, for us to be with Daddy. I used to make wishes. I used to cry myself to sleep thinking this, praying hard, begging some kind of God. I used to pray, when I was a kid.
And there was an answer, I got part of what I asked for. I got to be with Daddy. Me and Mom. But the rest of the family was still broken and I never got it fixed so I grew up and gave up praying. I don’t make wishes. I don’t rely on false hopes. I just move forward and daydream about the things I used to want and how I no longer want them.
As an immigrant, no matter how much you adapt to the new home, you never forget the pain you suffered. You never quite know who you are and what defines you. You try so hard to keep your past in the present and the present in itself but the two get mixed in and you get lost and you become powerless. It isn’t until you accept this blend of emotions and suffering that you get your power back. It isn’t until you go through a lot of hell before you love who you are. I don’t like talking about my past and how I used to feel like nothing. When you meet me, you have no idea how painful it was to be what I am before you. I talk like anybody else, walk like anybody else, and feign confidence and power so well I may come off intimidating. But I am so insecure, so powerless because I can’t forget what happened to me when I was 11 years old and my world changed without me knowing. It’s like I stepped into a fairy tale that for the longest time was a nightmare. I hurt so badly for my inabilities to understand the American Dream. I hurt so much for not knowing what it was that captivated Daddy so much, made him hate his past, made him fall in love with America. I didn’t deal with my pain. I just hoped it would go away. It did. After I learned to adapt and make a new present, I just forgot how I felt.
And today, I am still hurting. This is the pain of being an immigrant. This is the pain of being lucky to have the freedom that my own people die for, protest for, the same freedom that they fight as they get shot. This freedom hurts because I have it and I am burdened with luck and blessings. I am guilty for having this freedom that I didn’t fight for. This is the pain of immigration, the trauma of being given all the things you could ever want.
Even after 10 years, the pains of leaving and adjusting and moving all over don’t go away. And as you age, you look behind and every time you look back you can’t separate what was and what is. The little girl by the Caspian Sea is no longer me. I don’t pray. I don’t know how I do it anymore. I am not one, but two, three, four, five different parts. I don’t know how many exactly, but each time I am someone else, as each year passes, I am always remembering and it still hurts.
This is the pain and solitude of an immigrant.

She wonders. She drinks coffee out of a creme colored mug and stares at the melted snow on the porch. She puts down her cup and stares at the kitchen floor and wonders where she will go next. She will return to the city in about a week and she is looking for another job. She is already concerned about the summer, will she stay, will she come back home, will she go apartment hunting…with what money?
She keeps drinking her coffee and now it’s cold. She puts it in the microwave for 15 seconds. Everyone is working. Her father is somewhere doing a crossword puzzle out of a Persian newspaper. Her sister is at the office, eating the peanut butter sandwich she made the night before.
She makes another pot of coffee. She stares out the window, at the fan that turns with the wind. She feels sad, but is content if only for a second because the coffee is warming her a bit.

She sat in the kitchen and looked over to the empty sink. Finally, empty and clean. She got occasional urges to clean, every now and then. She looked at the lit, long, narrow hallway. She stared at her laundry basket with a few wet clothes that she had not been able to hang. She could hear her roommates talking as she listened to Emma Shapplin and her fantastic opera voice. How was she going to finish cramming for her morning exam in the few hours she had left of the night? She continued sitting at the coffee table, papers and books surrounding her. She was tired, jaded, nostalgic for feelings of comfort. She would be celebrating her 22nd in two days and she couldn’t bring herself to care. So what, she thought. Manhattan seemed so far away, even as she breathed the city air and took the subway everyday. Then why did she still long for it? She decided she wasn’t sure the thing she wanted existed, at least not how she saw it.
She decided to go back to studying. Outside, the winds blew and the city remained lit and awake.

When I was nine, my oldest brother left one day in the fall, at dawn. His traveling companion, also our relative, left with him, kissing me lightly on my cheek. I was awake. I could have opened my eyes, but I had said my goodbyes the night before. I wasn’t going to do it again. I heard them whisper. I heard them close the door. I heard their footsteps. I heard my mother’s muffled voice. I didn’t fall back asleep. I lied there, not knowing how to close my eyes.
When I was nine, Daddy was also not home. He had left the year before. I cried often. I hadn’t exactly learned to be tough and hold my tears like my mother. So I cried every chance I got. There was this one day, among many others, when my other brother came home from work and saw me running with tears to my mother’s bedroom. And I heard my mother say to him, “she misses her father.” I liked to think I was the most fragile because I was the baby of the family. I didn’t know that my sister and brothers had been through worst.
When I was nine, I hated school. I cried every morning. I prayed for it to end, for my pain to go away. I don’t know if I knew what that pain was. My father wasn’t there. But I wasn’t mad at him. I guess I just wanted to cry, and their absence was the perfect excuse. So I spent that year hating school. It was also the year I decided I loved my father more because he wasn’t there.
Those years ended somehow. I reunited with my father, not with my older brother. I also left my younger brother, so did my mother, later my sister did too. Today, my siblings are in serious relationships, married, and engaged, soon-to-be-married. They’ve all experienced leaving. They’ve all been left. Some, more than others. I didn’t exactly grow up with them. I sort of became my own version, more American and more confused. I experienced leaving them. I experienced living with them, at different times, in different places, temporarily. I learned to enjoy moments with them because I knew one of us would leave again. None of us likes to stay put. We are, after all, our mother’s children. We outgrow our normal states of being. We outgrown ourselves. We like to break free, maybe because we feel our mother never did. So we do what we think she would have done. Higher education, traveling constantly, learning to adapt and transform and recreate. We like to do it all. We like to make her happy, and somehow, somewhere, find our own happiness. We are not prisoners, so we take every opportunity to move, forward, always running away from something within ourselves.
Since we’ve all moved on to different homes, we try, every now and then to reconnect and reunite. We had a family reunion one summer. Temporary, but a reunion nevertheless. We learned that we like to drink, that we still laugh, that we have funny little habits. We also learned that we all have significant others and that we put them on pedestals.
I am not sure I will ever have that childhood idea of all of us. I used to want that from God, pretending there was one, all the time. I really prayed hard. I am not even sure I want that anymore, because it would be temporary. We would get bored. We would move again.
Maybe this is our destiny. The travelers, the immigrants, partly due to our mother’s past, partly because of our own desires. But no matter where we end up, we always remember how they left us, the way they parted, and the way we left them, the way we parted from them. Always.

I am in constant turmoil, with this city. This city is driving me insane. I want it. I don’t want it. I need it. I don’t need it. I hate it. I love it. I don’t see happy people here, no one has that glow, that satisfactory smile. I feel like everyone is tired, like me, always. There is such distance between us all, no connection, no sober conversations, no meaningful glances. Have I become just as sad and cynical? Have I lost my appetite for new things, new people? Lately, I don’t even introduce myself to new people. I don’t carry conversations. I get bored. I zone everyone out. I half-listen. I don’t listen. I don’t talk about myself. I don’t give out my real name, my nationality, my very complicated past life. I leave out names and relations. I am just distant. I am tired of connecting and proximity. I just want to close my eyes. Maybe I want to go back to that fantasy New York, the one that is unlike the version I live now. The one that was sort of perfect in my hand, unreachable with a certain glow, the one I was passionate about. I used to envy everyone who was part of the city. I used to be really sad when I left the city, driving home, thinking I had nothing to go back to. Now, I have what I wanted. And I almost don’t want it. I am tired of transforming myself all the time. I am sick of my self-criticism, my self-deprecation. I am really just sick of it. I want all that negative thoughts of myself to be, I don’t know, sucked out of me or something.
I am tired of transforming so I just do the everyday thing and I don’t try to make it happen, I just let it be, you know whatever is meant to be. If I happen to run into someone, I say hello. If a group of musicians come to the train, I hit pause on my iPod, and then when they leave, I am back in my own head. And some days nothing happens, and it’s okay. I just go to bed, not even hoping tomorrow would be any different.

Today is sunny. We drink coffee and laugh, and the laughter stays in my memory. I have a lot of memories. I have a good memory; I remember faces and details well. I play them in my head. Sounds, laughter, everything. I remember what people wear and if they have worn them before. It makes me happy, the act of remembering.
But remembering comes with nostalgia since you are so absorbed by the memories. They haunt you in a way, if you remember too much. I am so nostalgic, almost always. I remember, for example, the perfume my cousin Sasha’s mother used to wear, and if I smell it now, it’ll remind me of the two of them, how me and Sasha were best friends and how we always seemed to be together.
It’s worse, remembering how once your house was full of faces, people, and they no longer have a presence. And even worse when you see them again, and they no longer fit that memory. They’ve changed. You’ve changed. And it’s just not the same. It’s worse when these are people who are part of you, by blood. You know, like brothers, fathers, grandmothers. It’s worse when you remember how they hug you so lovingly, so deliberately, so well that it hurts, it really hurts the memory of their touch.
But it’s not so bad. You’ll die with so many good memories, so many details in your head. The smells, the way they wanted their coffee, the way they talked and asked you how you were, how your silence worried them, made them ask, “something is wrong, tell me, what is it?”
So we finished our coffees and I looked out, to the New York that was once just another place I wanted to conquer. I felt nostalgic, because our coffees finished, because we got up and got in the car and then they drove away, because it wasn’t yesterday anymore, because I was alone again with everything I ever wanted.