“Just the other day a video popped up on Facebook. It was only five years ago. We were in the park. I was pushing her on the bike, letting go. We used to have so much fun together. We’d always get ice cream. She’s a strawberry girl. I’m a vanilla guy. Chipwich, actually. I’m a Ch … | Continue reading
“I’m taking a break from school until I figure things out. I guess I have rebel traits. There were just so many things that felt out of my control, and it bothered me. You have to wake up at this time. You have to go do this. You have to go do that. It’s like I didn’t have any or … | Continue reading
“The question everybody wants to know is: why don’t the aliens contact us if they’re really here? The answer is simple: because it would melt your psyche to contact beings from another dimension. Whether it’s ghosts or spirits or deceased relatives or past lives or future lives o … | Continue reading
“It took me a long time to figure out that not being able to get my homework done doesn’t mean I’m a bad person.” | Continue reading
“I’m turning forty in August. Three kids, full time job. All my kids are under the age of seven. The amount of mental energy it takes, you know, juggling all of them and the constant questions about nothing. I mean, mom is busy, please, just give me a second. My husband tells me … | Continue reading
“You’re a slut and a whore for the algorithm. I couldn’t do it anymore. You can never feed it enough. You start out making art, and hoping that the door will open. You’re looking for that viral moment so it opens up the door and you can do the thing full time. But you start to co … | Continue reading
“Stop signs? I don’t care about any of that shit. Don’t have a license. Don’t have a license plate on my bike. I’m an outlaw through and through. I take it very seriously. The way I look at it, there’s a law of government and a law of man. And I follow the law of man. Right and w … | Continue reading
“They told me they loved me constantly, chronically, every day. They gave me a good home. They cared for me. They did all the basics, and above all that: they worked hard to put me in a great school district. But no matter how much they provide, your parents can’t give a shit for … | Continue reading
“It’s been a tough morning for me. I used to be a children’s librarian. But this morning I had to call publishers and tell them not to send me any more books. I just can’t read them anymore, not like I used to. And that was hard. It felt like I was cutting off a lifeline. It’s di … | Continue reading
“Picture it, okay? Mardi Gras. New Orleans. Bourbon Street. I’m on college break with my three best childhood friends. Zak is there with his parents. He’s got his mom and dad with him. So it’s two different vibes, but somehow we all end up on the balcony of the same bar. Everyone … | Continue reading
“They’re oblivious right now. They just think they’re at the park. I’m the one who’s got to figure stuff out. I’ve got enough money for us to get home. Then I’ve got to find a way to get something to eat. I’ve got to pay bills. We’re starting to get foreclosure letters in the mai … | Continue reading
“The person who hurt us, hurt both of us. But it affected us differently. I isolated myself. I started taking drugs when I was twelve, maybe thirteen. But she just moved on with her life. I could never understand: how can she be so happy, while I’m stuck in my head and constantly … | Continue reading
“I grew up with strangers. I wasn’t even with my parents from first to fifth grade. All the people that were supposed to care for me, and teach me, and guide me, they all failed me. It caused a lot of anger and honestly, a lot of heartbreak. I even wondered if my family was curse … | Continue reading
“Growing up I was very much in my own head, my own world. Instead of getting a babysitter my mom would just go to work and leave me at the house. We didn’t have a TV or anything. And when there’s no one to talk to, you just become your own friend. I’d look out the window and try … | Continue reading
(54/54) “I wish I could see it again. Just one more time. I wouldn’t need long. I’d spend a day in Tehran. I’d visit Persepolis, to see the ruins. I’d go to Nahavand, to see my people. To meet their children. And the children of their children. And then I’d go to his tomb. He was … | Continue reading
(53/54) “It’s a beautiful word in itself, Mitra. Someone who has no idea of its meaning can appreciate its beauty. Mitra always had a genius for beauty. She knew it completely. She wanted it around her at all times. Even now she keeps a book of Hafez by our bedside. It’s always i … | Continue reading
(52/54) “It always sits out on the shelf. It’s given structure to my life. I’ve wanted to be a knight. I’ve wanted to be a king. I’ve wanted to be Ferdowsi, living for higher ideals. But there’s old men in Shahnameh too. And that’s my idea of a king now, a grandfather. A 𝘉 … | Continue reading
(51/54) “It’s coming. In the streets it is silent. But in the homes, where Iran still lives, the drumbeat is building. The anger is building. The impatience is building, and soon it will come out. Iran will come out. Our young women have been leading us. But we cannot let them ma … | Continue reading
(50/54) “When I was eighty I was giving an interview on Persian television. I wanted to recite a verse, from the part of Shahnameh when Rostam selects Rakhsh as his horse. But no matter how hard I tried, I could not remember the line. For almost a minute I sat still. After that I … | Continue reading
(49/54) “We still take long walks together, even today. There’s a path through the forest near our house. Mitra still can’t stand the silence. She’ll walk off the path so she can hear the dry crunch of the leaves. She still talks the entire time, but these days our conversations … | Continue reading
(48/54) “I didn’t raise them to be Iranian first. Above all I wanted them to be good people. I wanted the same things for them that I want for all people: to do the next right thing, to say the next true thing. But they were growing up in tough times. So many bad things were bein … | Continue reading
(47/54) “When our grandchildren were born we moved to America to help raise them. First came Ahang’s son Sepanta. Then when I turned sixty we moved into Maziar’s house to help raise his newborn twin boys. And that’s where we’ve been for the last thirty years. The year that we mov … | Continue reading
(46/54) “There was nothing I could do. It was like watching a child fall from the roof of a building. I could only look on in agony. When I arrived in Germany there were two million unemployed. It was years before I could find a job. Resistance takes resources: you must travel, y … | Continue reading
(45/54) A jar of soil. That’s all I have left of my home. It’s good soil. A guidebook once called Nahavand ‘a piece of heaven, fallen to earth.’ But there’s blood in the soil too. There have been more wars on Iran’s soil than any other country. We’ve had more battles, more bloods … | Continue reading
(44/54) “On my final morning in Iran I woke with the sun. I knelt to the ground and prayed. It was a six mile walk to the border. The road climbed through the mountains, the same mountains that ran through Nahavand. But in Nahavand the trees were green. Here there was no life. Fe … | Continue reading
(43/54) “Thirty years earlier we’d sworn an oath, to give our lives for Iran. I considered it. There was one parliamentarian who fled to the mountains and died fighting. Even with one eye, I was still a good shot. I could have made a stand. But if I gave my life, it would have to … | Continue reading
(42/54) “At dawn we woke to the sound of shots. First the machine gun fire, then the single shots. That morning I counted more than ever before: twenty-one. When the newspaper arrived that morning, I ran my finger down the list until I found his name. It has always been my belief … | Continue reading
(41/54) “Mitra couldn’t sleep without me. On the nights when I came home late, I’d always find her awake listening to tapes. We still read poetry together. Even in the midst of the chaos, even on the darkest nights, even if only for twenty minutes. It was my greatest comfort. The … | Continue reading
(40/54) “Every morning we awoke to the sound of shots. The executions would begin with a volley of machine gun fire. Then there’d be a round of single shots, to make sure the prisoners were dead. I’d lay in bed and count them. When the newspaper arrived later that morning, I’d se … | Continue reading
(39/54) “It would have been suicide to fight. There were no courts to petition. No laws to challenge. The only weapon that we had left were our words. I joined together with five colleagues from the Pan-Iranist party, and we formed an underground journal. We met daily in an aband … | Continue reading
(38/54) “I could not find it anywhere. The Iran of Shahnameh. The Iran of Cyrus The Great. The Iran of Rumi, Hafez, Saadi, Khayyam. The Iran of our mothers and fathers. The Iran that I had loved since I was a little boy, it was no use to them. They didn’t care about our culture, … | Continue reading
(37/54) “The meeting was held in the office of the former speaker of parliament. He’d been executed four weeks earlier. It was an office I’d been to many times before. But everything beautiful had been removed: the paintings, the carpets, the furniture. In the center of the room … | Continue reading
(36/54) “The religious fanatics were less than ten percent, but you couldn’t tell them apart. They looked like us. They spoke the same language. They did what no invader had been able to do for three thousand years, erase our nation, our culture, our connection to the past. But t … | Continue reading
(35/54) “Every morning we woke to the sound of shots coming from the prison near our house. The executions were always held at dawn. When the newspaper arrived later that morning, it would show the names and photographs of the dead. An atmosphere of fear began to spread across th … | Continue reading
(34/54) “The revolution officially ended on February 11th, 1979. The military announced that they would no longer resist, and Khomeini’s forces took control of the weapons. That morning a bullet came through our window and landed in the wall above our bed. The country became like … | Continue reading
(33/54) “On the day Khomeini’s plane landed the road from the airport was lined with hundreds of thousands of cheering people. I hadn’t completely lost hope. The king was gone. But we still had a government, a parliament, a constitution. The only thing new was this man. Maybe he’ … | Continue reading
(32/54) “In the end the king turned against his own friends. One day a colleague approached me in the halls of parliament. She was married to a former minister, and the king had just thrown her husband in jail to appease the mobs. She asked me what I thought was going to happen. … | Continue reading
(31/54) “One of Dr. Ameli’s first acts as Minister of Information was to bring cameras and microphones into parliament. For the first time ever, our speeches would now reach the ears of ordinary Iranians. During the first recorded session I gave a speech. I spoke about the same t … | Continue reading
(30/54) “We were at the eighteenth birthday party of our daughter Ahang when we learned that a crowded movie theater had been set on fire in the town of Abadan. The arsonists had locked the exits from the outside, and four hundred people were killed. It was the largest act of ter … | Continue reading
(29/54) “The riots began in Qom. One day Khomeini gave a speech saying that the moment had arrived for a true Islamic revolution. And that it was the duty of all Muslims to oppose the monarchy. The rioters targeted anything they deemed anti-Islamic: cinemas, liquor stores, shops … | Continue reading
(28/54) “The king loved Iran. And I believed him when he claimed that it was his dream to have a more open society one day. With a truly free press. And truly free elections. But he didn’t think Iran was ready. It was fear. So many foreign powers were trying to control Iran. The … | Continue reading
(27/54) “One morning I was called into the Speaker’s office along with another colleague. We were told that he’d received a call from the king’s office, and the king needed our two votes on an upcoming issue. My colleague was silent. But I replied: ‘I cannot do it. If I was a sol … | Continue reading
(26/54) “Mitra was the oldest in her class, but all the younger students loved her. She knew all the latest in culture: the movies, the magazines, the trends. Every night when I came home she’d always be up listening to tapes. The seventies were a golden age of music in Iran: Goo … | Continue reading
(25/54) “There is a game that Mitra and I would often play. One of us would recite a verse from a poem. Then whatever letter that verse ended with, the other person would think of a verse that began with that letter. We’d go back and forth until someone got stuck. And Mitra could … | Continue reading
(24/54) “One afternoon the empress and prince attended a session of parliament. It was an important day. Everyone was hoping to make a strong impression, and I’d prepared a speech especially for the occasion. I was the last speaker on the schedule. The Speaker of Parliament saw m … | Continue reading
(23/54) “Each night when I came home from parliament I’d find Mitra ready to go out. And no matter how tired I felt, off we would go. She always looked perfect. She stayed current with all the latest trends. Every few months she’d have her hair cut in the style of a different Ame … | Continue reading
(22/54) “Dr. Ameli was elected to parliament in the same election, and was chosen by his peers for a leadership position. He was a unifying figure. A man without enemies. His words never cut. He attacked philosophies; never people. And he was one of the best speakers in parliamen … | Continue reading
(21/54) “After the election I took one more visit to Ferdowsi’s tomb. This time I brought my own children with me. It hadn’t changed much in thirty years, but I had changed. I had a better understanding of the sacrifice he’d made for his ideals. Ferdowsi worked for thirty-three y … | Continue reading