1/29/12

The emptiness is thick.

The garden walls and tangerine trees have witnessed another death, an end to a generation, an end to a collection of beautiful poetry, of stories spanning from the beginning of time to my grandfather’s life, of advice on love and life, of ruminations on the purpose and meaning of life. I remember my grandfather once telling me how we spend so much of our life filled with regret. I am now living in those moments. There are so many more questions for me to ask him, so many more poems for him to interpret, so many more stories for him to tell. I didn’t get to ask him about his uncles or his childhood in Tehran. I didn’t ask him about his wedding or about the birth of any of his children. I never asked him if he met Mossadegh or what happened when he was arrested for being a leader in his nationalistic movement. There are so many details about his life that I want to know and more importantly that I want him to know that I care about. I didn’t get to recite the poems that I had been memorizing for him. I didn’t get to show him my hands that I had been moisturizing everyday because he would tell me that they were too rough. I didn’t get to hold his hands in mine for the last time.

He would also always say how two hearts have a path to each other, that even though we are not sitting next to each other or speaking with each other, that our hearts are connected. This connection defies space and time. And I hope that it also defies life and death.

1/26/12

As my time in Sweden comes to an end, my eagerness to get to Iran dwindles. Am I ready to make this venture? Am I ready to put on that armor and fight my way through lines and pretend that I am a lot tougher than I really am? Am I ready to face the reality of my grandfather’s passing, to experience that emptiness, like a suspenseful story with no climax?

I am not sure. Part of me does not want to experience that loss. Part of me wants to stay far away and pretend that nothing has changed. Part of me wants to believe that the further the distance the peachier the picture.

But then there is the part of me that is looking for that sense of familiarity, that small recognition that says that I belong somewhere, however slight or wishful it might be. Even in the sea of white that is Sweden, I am constantly looking for fellow dark skins. I was surprised to find that out of a population of 9 million somewhere close to 60,000 are Iranian. Thus I am constantly on the look out, looking out for others who have created their own world within another world, who keep their memories strong but far, who pretend to make a foreign land home, and who at some point have come to accept this destiny.

1/19/12

The Amsterdam airport has become a familiar place over the years. On my trips to Iran and back, Amsterdam is my usual layover city. E2 is the gate. Today when I got off the plane and entered through E2, my heart skipped a beat. I looked around for other Iranians sitting at the gate but saw none. At that moment I truly felt a loss, a heaviness in my heart. I realized how the airport and that gate in particular represents a liminal space for me, my transition into and out of another piece of me.
Today I felt my loss even greater because I wasn’t heading directly to Iran. I have a week long training in Sweden beforehand. Even though I have been looking forward to this training and know it will be healing for me in many ways, I felt eager to get to Iran. I felt eager to get to a place which is the most familiar and yet so foreign, a place that opens my heart and unites with my soul and yet makes me feel like an outsider.

But I must wait, like a woman anticipating her lover’s return.

1/18/12

One by one, people and beings I love drop from my world
One by one, the years go by as I lessen my grip on what I dreamt my life to be
One by one, the tears fall from my face and are swept by the wind like leaves on a cold dark empty street

Dear Wind, take these tears and carry them across the world so that they may land on the heart of my grandfather’s grave
Dear Wind, take my cries, carry them across the world so that they may mix with the cries of my cousins, aunts, and uncles and our sorrows can meld into one united grief over an ended era
Dear Wind, take this distance and years of separation that has plagued my life and make it disintegrate so that it can’t afflict another child who sits alone dreaming of what family could look like.