Month: September 2025

It’s been over two and a half years since I left Iran. The images I have of it now are of a different world. A world I’m aftaid of revisiting, although I certainly will again, once I have enough money, and enough courage. Because you need courage to leave the place that gave you the safety to figure your shit out to see the place that puts a weight on the back of all its residents.

Iran is always different. There is nowhere in the world whose streets, as plain as they often are, will give the same feeling. Its isolation creates a barrier away from the crazy of the international world, to create a crazier local world. Its people are free in such an odd way, and suffering so silently. Its poverty is so normalized. Its mountains so tall, and its soil so sad.

It is a land that deserves the best, but has so often gotten the worst. Its people are so accepting of the suffering it seems, because it’s become part of who we are. And so we find joys in suffering.

Yet I wished we didn’t have to. I wish we were always a little isolated, because the rest of the world is mad, but also prosperous and happy. I wish we all had houses and food and safety, and freedom to live how we wanted. I wish life wasn’t such a gloomy affair for us, as we went about our days. I wish the government workers were all happy, like the ones in Quebec, who don’t have to put on the ugly black “maghna’e” or get shit salaries to deal with sadder people than them. And I wish the metros weren’t always so full of hopelessness. And I wish a kilo of chicken hadn’t become so expensive.

But I can’t do anything. I never could. That’s how useless I’ve always been.

Recently I accepted a full-time position for a job I had already been working part-time. When they asked me if I wanted the morning 8-4 hours or the evening 1-9, I asked for the latter. Why? I’m not sure.

My first reasoning was that I’ve never been able to wake up that early since I finished high school. But then I thought, well then I was able to do it for 12 years of schooling. So why does it feel like torture now?

And I think I had my answer in the question. During the 12 years of schooling, I was at home, and life was terrible, so I often stayed up late when everyone was asleep to have hours and hours of alone time, the only time that was for me. That was the only way I could be a little bit happy. In my own world of imagination. I needed that, even at the cost of sleep.

Now, that time has passed. I live alone, and no matter what time I wake up, I’ll be alone. But still, nights are my time. The time when my pain is mine. When no one is jogging in the park, no one is chatting cheerfully in the cafes. Because no sane person stays up so late. So it’s for the insane.

Or maybe it’s just that we all have different natural waking hours. But that’s a boring explanation.

The life I had before the age of 11 was very different for me than anything else I experienced afterwards. My dad was alive, and my mom was healthy, at least physically. There was much more snow in my hometown, and home was mostly safe. Life felt cold, but along with the deep sensations of childhood, it left an impression in me that still persists today, when I’m in Montreal, a city so similar sometimes.

When people speak here with their Québécois accent, when they take pictures and put them on their instagram and somehow make it look like what I’ve always felt as a child, such as the photos that my favorite barista posts on hers, with a coldness that is so beautiful. I do love that coldness. And I wish I could connect with it more, because that is my reality.

The coldness feels like a lonely beach, with none of the colours too strong, none of the characters too important, none of the love too real. Everything a little bit faded, because life is such. There is nothing glamorous, but existence itself.

I remember it as the dark street beside the big fenced off park in Tabriz whose name I never learned because I never went there after my dad died. The liver shop we went to at night, which we loved but only went to very occasionally. The old, plastic chairs, the curious park that I had to watch from the outside, the movement of the animal there whose species my kid brain couldn’t figure out in the darkness. The liver that was always so delicious, which my dad sometimes gave me a raw piece of, with salt, to enjoy, because raw liver is so enjoyable. The family, faded in the dark but there. And my heavy, lonely heart. Though not as heavy as now that none of it exists.