The city wraps me in its arms. The subways take me on an underground journey. Faces pass over me. Their reflections in the dirty windows. My reflection: a sad girl. I am floating, wrapped in the arms of a stranger. This is my home. This is not my home. As the subway shakes and we collide against the rails, against time, against energy, I lose myself. I think of the first time I started living here in the city of my dreams. Not anyone else’s dream. I know this city is most people’s dream. But it’s a different dream for me. Or it was. For me it was about me. I had to do something big. I had lived the immigrant life. I had learned to love two cultures inside me, two parts of me that collide everyday, that want to fight me. I love the parts in me that are different. I love the Farsi I have kept, the mother tongue that I speak, the way I can also write poetically in three languages if I let my heart speak. I also love my dreams in English. I love that it’s still a learning process, that I find new challenges everyday, as a writer, as a bilingual, as a woman. But in order to dream big I had to challenge myself even more. I had to break away from family because I had to feel like I could do it alone. I had to let go of my mother’s hands. My mother, who was with me every step of the way, as we climbed together, as we taught each other how to speak the new language. When I cried, she cried with me, she felt my pain, she told me I could do it, she believed in me. I had to dream big, not just for me, but for her. I dream for my father, the man who made me want to love the America he was in love with. The man who broke away to give me something better. The man who is many years my senior, but who always follows close by, always by my side, always on my side. Many people dream. I made mine come true. I took the city by the fingertips and I hoped to become something. I was in the biggest delusion. I was dreaming bigger than I intended. I dreamed for the wrong reasons. Maybe.
The subway takes me underground. Everyday. I am doing the same thing. I am repeating myself, over and over, everyday envisioning that I may be growing. But I am not so sure that I am. I am seeing nothing new anymore. I am just moving, the same, the same. This sameness, this repetition makes me bored, makes me hate myself, makes me feel like I am letting myself down. I have to do something. BIG. I have a gift. It would be insulting to my mother, to my father if I kept living like this. If I became no one. If I did nothing.
What have I become?
I have to take a new route. I have to walk a different street. But then what? What will I see? How will my perspective on life change? How will I become better? How can I help society? What am I supposed to do? Keep writing? To what end? For what cause?
I do not belong. Anywhere. Nowhere on a map, there is nowhere I can point to and say, this, this right here is mine. Nothing is mine. Not Tehran. Not Madrid. Not Virginia. Not New York. Not Brussels. Not Paris. Not the places I visit, not the places I live, not the places I am. I am no one. I am something. I have no home. I am…
When did I stop dreaming? Maybe I took it too far, with this dream. Maybe I have to wake up and change something. Again. Change.
To what end?