Finally, I’m becoming more comfortable reading and listening to French material. I can watch interesting videos on Youtube and read short stories while looking up only a few words. And that’s fucked up.

I’ll tell you why. It’s because this is the fifth language I’ll be knowing. I grew up in Tabriz, where I spoke Azeri (Turki, if you’re from there), and knew Persian as well. I grew up with Turkish TV shows, with their own world of wonder and amazement, in the poor streets of Istanbul and among the policemen and prostitutes of the streets. I went to university in Tehran, a city seen as a different, richer world from Tabriz, where everything was happening all the time in the midst of the polluted air. And now I’m in Québec, in a bilingual city itself stuck between North American values of work hard bitch and the European mindset of chill dudeee.

Now that I’m learning French, there’s a new way of thinking opening up. A new set of values, a new universe of how to think. And this will be the fifth one. It won’t be the conservative Tabriz way of thinking, it won’t be the odd, big city Tehran feeling, it won’t be the Turkish world of amazement, it won’t be the Anglophone North American way of life. It’ll be a whole new universe, so huge and so amazing. And it’ll tear me apart.

Every one of these places, these cultures, I’ve come to love. The carrot shops of Tabriz, the city with its distinct vibe, lost between the Caucasus and Persians. Tehran, always fighting for freedom, for a breath of fresh air. Istanbul, figuring itself out through a billion cultures and people with the Turkish kindness, smell of the sea, and fish sandwichs. And Montreal, North American yet Québécois and proud. All the languages tying them together, but their values and differences pulling them apart.

Each one is different, sometimes opposites in certain ways. One cannot be in Tabriz the way he is in Montreal. One cannot be in Istanbul the way one is in Tehran. You have to adapt, to change, to accept and absorb the people and their ways of life and thought. And then it becomes so easy to lose yourself.