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.