Longing

Longing Until a person leaves, they don't know what a homeland is made of. You think you'll miss your home, your mother, the street where you grew up. Then one day, a thousand leagues away, you stand beside a clean street and find yourself missing the muddy snow at the side of the road—the snow splashed with black water by passing cars, the snow we used to lift our trousers to avoid. Now you could look at a picture of that same snow for hours. I miss the smell of sheep outside the butcher's. The sawdust that spilled from the carpenter's shop onto the pavement and stuck to the soles of our shoes. The smell of freshly cut wood; the few steps past that shop I took every day, never thinking that one day I might never pass it again. I miss the cawing of crows in Tehran's lanes. The mornings I pulled the pillow over my ears and asked why they wouldn't be quiet. If only they'd wake me once more. Morning comes here too. There are birds here too. You get used to the sounds, learn your way home, find out which bakery opens earliest. Life gradually settles into place. Only sometimes a sound is missing. The very sound you spent a lifetime complaining about. I miss “Wash me” on the dusty window of the school disciplinarian's car. The finger that secretly added another word after the bell. The laughter we swallowed when he came near. I don't know what became of that car. I don't know if he's still alive. I can't even remember who wrote on the window that day. It's strange that, so many years later, you can miss the handwriting of someone whose name you don't even know. I miss the traffic on Hemmat. The horns. Radio Drama, a sentence lost beneath the sound of a truck. Father's hand on the gearstick and his familiar question: “Shall we go this way or the other?” Back then I only wanted to arrive sooner. Now I want to stay right there, in that same car, behind that same light—even if it doesn't turn green until nightfall. Anyone can long for something: a person, a home, a day that's gone. But far from your homeland, you gradually find that even things you never knew had a place in your heart can make it ache. I miss the broken bricks beside an unfinished building. The loose paving tile that splashed dirty rainwater onto our socks. The sound of the grocer's shutter being pulled up. The broken doorbell whose button you had to hold down until someone called from behind the door: “I'm coming ... let go!” No one here knows why those few words can bring me to tears. Everyone can miss the rain. But I also miss the lash of Ahvaz's scorching sun. The foul smell of the marsh. The shirt that clung to my back with sweat, the narrow strip of shade along a wall that made room for a few of us. Sometimes I close my eyes and try to remember that heat, to feel it on my skin, to be a little less far away for a few moments. Without our noticing, a homeland enters the body through such things: through smells, sounds, the dust we wiped from the table at night that had returned by morning. Then years pass, and part of you is still there: beside that carpenter's shop, behind that car window, in those few minutes you thought needed to end sooner. But it hurts more to long for a homeland left in ruins. Not to know how many of your landmarks will still be there when you return. To find the street but not the house. Even so, I still think of the roots in the soil: the things that cannot be seen from here, but are still alive. One day those roots will sprout. The rain will dance for them. Snow will shelter them, and the meadow will become their clothing. And we will return, beside those shoots, with hands that have been away for so many years, to make our homeland beautiful again, as it deserves to be. Long live Iran. #JavidShah