R came back to our table with a Starbucks cup of hot chocolate without whip cream, regular American coffee, and a slice of chocolate cake topped with melted marshmallows. I looked at her exotic, slanted eyes that were looking to the distance. She said she was neither happy nor sad. This expression has been on face for a while now, occasionally disappearing. I told her I felt the same when I first came to Virginia, alone, lost, a complete stranger. It took a while, but they eventually went away, those ugly feelings.
“I know you feel little,” I said. “I felt this small,” I said and pressed my thumb against my index finger.
“I don’t even feel that; I’m more like a dot,” she said.
We both laughed.
She put her face down, her hair covering her face. I looked around me, searching for words. I wished I hadn’t been the lucky one.
She said I had come with a future. She was right. I’d been only eleven. But I still think she could have a future too. She just needs time to realize aging doesn’t mean it’s too late. It doesn’t mean you can’t go after the things you want. It doesn’t mean you should give up.
For most of us who leave our countries behind, America is our last stop, our heaven. Sometimes we lose our identities and personalities; we look for ways to blend in, even dye our hair blond. We try so hard to portray an American attitude, ignoring each other in the streets, switching from Farsi to English. At home, we speak broken Farsi, thinking and dreaming in English. Iran becomes a map of the past, a country on the far side, a shadow we try to erase forever. I’m not saying this is everybody’s point of view, but it definitely is a good portion of the Iranian/Persian population in the U.S.

My mother was singing a traditional Iranian song by Marzieh (a famous singer) and it made me think of something. Not that I hadn’t thought of it before, but at that moment I suddenly thought of how much my mother has given up. She left a country where she’d lived fifty years of her life in. She gave up a life-time of memories, songs, people, culture, and everything that was life for her. For me, it was only eleven years and although those years meant a lot, they weren’t significant enough to shape who I am today. They weren’t big enough to give me an identity. But for someone like my mother, those years had shown her one culture, one setting, one language, one foundation of life. She had already found, I suppose, some sort of identity for herself, some form of reliance. But she had the courage to start over, begin from zero, start a whole new map of life…It amazes me, her power and strength, her courage and confidence to take such a jump, start a new life after years of one identity and be born again…But I see why and how she was able to do it: it was all for freedom…My mother is a believer, she didn’t think it was impossible to start anew and live in happiness. She didn’t think she was too old to be happy and have an American life. She was a believer and still is. Her book of life used to be pages of sadness and loss, but she refused to leave them that way. She wanted something and she knew it was possible to be a dreamer…