Alireza Borhan's Website

Everyday I think about my life when I was in Iran. The eighteen years I spent in Tabriz, excruciatingly lonely, getting hurt without a solution. And the five years I spent in Tehran, lonely again, and always running around looking for a fix. Girls that didn’t want me, friends that didn’t like me, apartments that were so expensive and lonely. And often no one to talk to. Lost in the unbelievably unequal city. I even knew a friend who killed herself. One of the only people I could genuinely call a friend, and she killed herself.

I often try to understand what it all meant. I know that I grew because of those experiences, sure. I know that some people I knew also try to make sense of their relationship with me and understand what the fuck it meant. But I also know that it didn’t have to be this way if some things were different. If my parents hadn’t been in an accident, for instance. If I had a father, things would definitely have been different.

Things don’t have to suck but they do. So I guess pain is meaningless. It happens because it happens. And life sucks ass.

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.

I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know what I want my life to be. What is it all for? I don’t know.

I feel alone. Not in the sense that I don’t have friends, but in the sense that nobody will ever understand me. I’m not sure where everything I’m doing will lead. A career? A family? A few decades of having fun and exploring? Art? Literature? Love?

There’s no meaning to life. We all know that. But it’s not about an intellectual meaning, is it? It’s about a feeling of not being lost. So how can we create a feeling?

They say relationships are the only real meaningful thing in life. That I agree with. But god, in this digital age, even that seems impossible. You get married, you have kids, you invite your friends over, all of you in the living room you worked decades to pay for, and everyone is on their phones. Is that meaning?

So, music. It’s such a raw and complicated thing. I love it and I hate it. So ephemeral, so indescribable. So different from words. Words and books and writings have existed for thousands of years. Music has too, but the old ones are gone. And we think we know so much because we’ve been able to record and transcribe music for a few centuries. Fuck that shit.

But it does go to the heart. And for me, it represents certain stages of my life. The younger years, of course, it was haphazard. My dad would play us Persian pop music on our trips for us to dance and sing to in the car. I tried listening to Persian rap when I was in primary school. Then I listened to American pop in middle school. Then in high school, a lot of indie rock. Then in university, a fucking flood of new music came through.

I listened to so many new things, mainly because the people around me were sharing them with me. It was anything and everything, prog rock, jazz, folk, indie, metal, whatever. And I listened to them avidly, trying to understand the people around me. Then that time passed too and I moved to Canada.

Here, everything went fucking crazy in my life. I was so alone, and everything was so horrible sometimes. But music was there, and I started making playlists for the first time. I discovered so much music from my native language, and that was the first playlist I was proud of. Then came other ones, and each one I listened to a lot while I was making them, not because I was trying to make a playlist, but because they were helping me understand my damn complicated life and feelings. So they became memories of feelings and people and places that often no longer existed. They gave form to the ache in my heart. A virtual, abstract, untouchable form, sure, but a form.

The Turki playlist reminded me of my childhood in Tabriz. The Azeri jazz playlist reminded me of my dad and his freedom of spirit. The Streets of Life Persian rap playlist reminded me of my lonely years in the crowdedness and dirtiness of downtown Tehran. Then there was a playlist I had just for all the childhood I lost when my dad died, the feelings of joy that took me a decade and a half to even mildly experience again. There was the Persian rock playlist that reminded me that Iran wasn’t all hell, that this music could make it worth it to be Iranian. At some point after I graduated, my mind was all over the place, and so classical music seemed to make that better, and I made a playlist for that. For a few months, I was so angry, so burnt-out, that I could only listen to metal and shoegaze, and I made a long playlist for that which helped me revive and survive. Then the sadness of many lost relationships hit again, and I made a playlist for melancholic rock. And now, I feel somewhat connected to life again, or at least feel like I’m reconnecting slowly, and a prog rock playlist, a genre I hadn’t really listened for a couple of years, is being made in honor of that.

So yeah, maybe music is not such a mess. Maybe life is. And maybe future playlists will keep on capturing memories of my life.

Often, I can’t really understand why there has to be so much suffering in this world. Why poverty, cruelty, oppression, and abuse should exist. Why people should be so hurt. Why powerful people should be so selfish and why the powerless so powerless. It really isn’t even about the lack of justice for me, it’s more that my mind literally cannot comprehend it. How can it even be possible? Perhaps this lack of comprehension is why people end up supporting dictators and bullies. Not because they’re bad, but because, like me, their minds cannot accept the reality of this cruelty. Maybe it’s too painful. Maybe it would push us into a depression that can never be cured. And then, what is life, if so dark? Maybe the next generation will figure it out. Things are moving fast in these decades and centuries, so who knows. But I doubt it. Because the people I grew up with, they definitely also know how to be cruel, selfish, and abusive. People are monsters and the world is hell. And no matter how much we trick our brains, this is a fact that will never change.

Well, apparently I’ve got something called Recurrent Corneal Erosion. It’s when your eye gets dry at night, and when you open it in the morning, a thin layer gets pulled off of the eye. It’s painful and horrible and I hate it.

HOWEVER, the experience has been interesting. The pain causes you to want to sleep until your eye heals itself enough for you to be functional, usually in a few hours. In those hours, the foggy pain goes to the back of your head, and everything feels so odd, lonely, and old. You realize the importance of love. You realize that you wish you had someone with you, like the divorced middle aged man in House MD whose wife and kids come to him while he’s sick but then he leaves them again when he gets better. But you’re a better person, so you remember the pain even when it’s gone. You know that what you felt was real, that it says something. And fuck it you don’t want to be alone the next time it happens.

I’ve realized that life can only have meaning if we, in our heads, have the ability to make meaningful stories of it. It doesn’t make sense, so we have to make it make sense. We have to say there was a reason for that shit friendship, or that lonely, painful year. We have to be able to tell stories. We do it either through religions, detaching ourselves a little bit, or, for me, by finding connections to the stories of movies and books and other people’s lives that I know of. And that’s important I think, because not everyone seems to be able to do it. And if you can’t make sense of your own story, like how the story of a book makes sense, you’ll always be hopeless, destitute, depressed. So I guess this is the importance of fiction for me.