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.