Love Lost

I want to bury you in the deepest darkest corner of my heart and never remember that I once loved you.

I want to bury you and never remember that you were once my heart, my pulse and the reason for my every breath.

I want to bury you and never remember that you once permeated my entire being.

I want to bury you and never remember that you once loved me.

I want to bury you and never remember that I died a thousand times loving you.

I want to bury you and never remember how I came to life when you loved me.

I want to bury you and never remember that you were once my happiness.

I want to bury you and never remember the coldness of your hands, your eyes and your heart the last time I saw you.

I want to bury you and never remember how my heart was ripped to pieces the day you left me.

I want to bury you and never remember how I drowned in the sea of my sorrows once you were gone.

I want to bury you in the deepest darkest corner of my heart and never remember how I suffered loving you.

I want to bury your love.

A Song

I love this song by Leonard Cohen.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pA5UhNaYw0&safety_mode=true&persist_safety_mode=1&safe=active

Below is Leonard Cohen's words about his inspiration for the song. It makes the poetry more meaningful.

'Dance Me To The End Of Love' ... it's curious how songs begin because the origin of the song, every song, has a kind of grain or seed that somebody hands you or the world hands you and that's why the process is so mysterious about writing a song. But that came from just hearing or reading or knowing that in the death camps, beside the crematoria, in certain of the death camps, a string quartet was pressed into performance while this horror was going on, those were the people whose fate was this horror also. And they would be playing classical music while their fellow prisoners were being killed and burnt. So, that music, "Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin," meaning the beauty there of being the consummation of life, the end of this existence and of the passionate element in that consummation. But, it is the same language that we use for surrender to the beloved, so that the song -- it's not important that anybody knows the genesis of it, because if the language comes from that passionate resource, it will be able to embrace all passionate activity.

Plight of the Iranian Baha'is

Below is the link to the Colorado Public Radio's interview with my sister and I about the plight of the Iranian Baha'is.

http://www.cpr.org/article/Bahais_Work_to_End_Years_of_Persecution

For more information about the Baha'i Faith, please go to www.bahai.org.

Moving to the US (Part 2)

THIS IS CONTINUATION OF PART ONE THAT WAS POSTED PREVIOUSLY.

The people on the plane were mostly Iranians. Two of the four flight attendants were American. I had seen 2 or 3 Americans in my life before, so seeing the very fair skinned, tall, blue eyed and light haired women was interesting to me. The flight took about 22 hours. We stopped in France and England. With each stop more Iranians left the plane and more westerners got on the plane. I started to hear less and less Persian spoken on the plane. We landed in New York City at about 2:00 AM. Going through the customs was a huge challenge. The immigration agents had all sorts of questions. My parents didn't speak any English, and I only spoke a few words. I had to run around and ask the other Iranians who spoke English how to say what I needed to say in English. I remember feeling overwhelmed and scared. I thought, “What did I get myself into? It’s going to take me forever to learn English and until then I don’t know how I’m going to live.”

My brother and his American girlfriend were waiting for us once we left the immigration area and officially entered the country. That night we drove about 4 hours to Maryland where my brother lived. His house was entirely made of wood in contrast to the houses back home that are made of brick with very thick brick walls separating the rooms. The house seemed fragile and paper like to me. It had 4 small bedrooms with wood floors, and you could hear people talking in other rooms, since the walls were made of thin wood (drywall). When I woke up the next day, I looked outside the window and saw how lush and forest like the area was. I couldn't believe that I was in the US. The scenery around me was so different from what I was used to. It was all very surreal. It all seemed like a dream, the feeling that I was in a dream lasted for several months. Every so often, I would stop in my track and remind myself of where I was and be amazed by it. Everything was so different, the people, the places, the language, the cars, the food, the signs and etc.

I remember on the second or third day of my arrival, my brother's girlfriend accidentally dropped something on the kitchen floor and said, “Oh shit”. I didn't know what that word meant. At night, when my brother came home, I asked him what it meant. He told me, but I didn't believe him. To me the “S” word was a very dirty word to utter loudly for something so minute. It’s equivalent in Persian was not even in my vocabulary. I could never say it out loud. I thought, “How could she say that word so causally in front of someone else?” One of the things that I soon realized was that Americans are totally comfortable using vulgar language in routine conversation. Over the next two years, I heard all the common vulgar words in the English language. I was shocked every time I heard a new one, but eventually I got used to it. Ten years later, in an argument with my first husband, Paul, I heard myself say the “f” word. I was shocked and appalled at myself. It was a word that he and every young person around me used often. I had become numbed to it.

Another thing that was a huge adjustment for me was the food. On the second night of our arrival, my brother took us to McDonolds and said, “This is a place were all Americans go to eat.” He ordered Big Macs for us, since we didn’t know what to order or how to order. I didn’t like the smell of my Big Mac. With hesitation, I took a bite and nearly threw up. I could not swallow it. I kept it in my mouth for a few minutes before I finally swallowed it. I thought that it was the worst thing I had ever tasted. The taste and smell of the sauce and melted cheese were unbearable to me. I put the Big Mac down and didn’t have another one until 4 years later, at which point my taste had changed so much that I loved the Big Mac I ate, and it became a part of my unhealthy college diet. There were a lot of foods that just tasted so odd to me that I could not bear to eat them for years. One of them was cheese. I was used to Feta cheese and variations of it. I had never had American cheese, Cheddar cheese, Swiss cheese and etc before. The texture of the cheeses common in the US felt like plastic to me. It took years before I could eat cheese. It took 10 years before I could eat a grilled cheese sandwich. It took about 10 years before I could eat Nachos. I couldn’t stand the texture of melted cheese for many years. A lot of these foods, I now love.


It took a few weeks until I was able to register at a high school. My brother was very busy with his job, and it was finally his girlfriend who took me to a school in Washington DC to register. It was a huge school with a very diverse student body. About one third of the students were African American, one third white and one third were foreign students. Since the high school was in Washington DC there were a lot of kids from other countries at that school. I was supposed to be in 12th grade and already had enough credits to graduate, but because my English was so poor, I was told that they wanted to hold me back one year, and have me take some of the classes that I had already taken back home again, so that my English would improve. The classes that I enrolled in were physics, Algebra, Physical Education, English As Second Language and an English reading class. The school was huge, and I was lost in it. I had a hard time finding my classes and once I got to my classes, I didn’t understand anything that was going on in the class. I would leave the classes with a ton of homework, but I couldn’t read any of my books, since I didn’t know English. I went through my days with a strong sense of doom not knowing how to read, write or do my homework. It felt like I was in an impossible situation. There was only one class that wasn’t horrible and that was my English as a Second Language class. That class was at my level. The teacher spoke very slowly and used very simple words. I would translate each word in my head and then put the whole thing together, and if I knew all the words then I understood the sentence. I was at that school for about 2 hellish weeks. My teachers didn’t even care that I didn’t understand anything in the class. The only students that occasionally tried to talk to me were the foreign students. The path that I was on was familiar to them.

Getting back and forth to school was difficult also. I had to take the city bus and walk a mile or so each way. Since I didn’t understand much English, the first week or so, I kept taking the wrong bus and it was an ordeal finding my way home. It seems that I was always lost and had to rely on the kindness of some poor soul that would take the time to explain to me how to get home in the simplest possible terms.

One day when I was standing at the bus stop, I saw 2 young men talking. I didn’t understand what they were talking about, but they kept repeating the words “thirty three”. That was the first time that I became aware of the “th” sound. It is a sound that we don’t have in Persian. It sounded very odd to me, how you put your tongue between your teeth to make the sound. That was the first time I realized how the “th” should be pronounced. Back home in my English class, I had heard my teacher pronounce that sound like the letter ‘t’. Another sound that was one that I eventually realized we don’t have in Persian was the “w” sound. So I used to pronounce “w” like a “v”.

One afternoon when I was walking home from school, I saw some construction workers. They started talking to me, but I didn’t understand what they were saying. One of them said something to me, which I didn’t completely understand. I thought he asked me if I had a boyfriend, and I just lied and said yes so that he would leave me alone. When he heard my reply of ‘yes’ he smiled and said, “I’ll make you happy.” I paused and translated that sentence in my head and understood what he meant. Suddenly, I felt terrified. I thought he might want to touch me. I said, “no, no” and walked away really fast looking back to make sure he wasn’t following me. What he had asked me was if he could be my boyfriend, and he thought that I said yes. In my mind’s eye, I still see that man’s face clearly. In the first couple of years of my life here, there were a number of times that guys approached me for a date, wanting to talk or get close, and I never knew how I was supposed to handle those situations. Part of the time I didn’t fully understand them and when I did I didn’t know what to say if I didn’t want their attention or if I did want their attention. So there were a lot of awkward and weird moments as far as men were concerned. I probably came across as very odd to them. I was in a deep culture shock for the first two years of my life here. In my culture, the relationships between men and women are much more guarded, formal and have the appearance of aloofness on the women’s side even if they are interested. Of course, all of that is changing with the ever-growing influence of American movies and culture in Iran.


After a couple of weeks of school in Washington DC, one day I talked to Mahta one of my relatives who lived in Olathe, Kansas. She said that when she came to the US, she went to a high school in Olathe, Kansas. In that high school, all of her credits from Iran were accepted, and she only studied American Government, American History and English and was able to graduate from high school in a year. She told me that if I move there and go to school there, it would be easier for me. That sounded great to me, since I had taken a lot of math and science courses in Iran, and at the Washington DC high school, they wanted me to take all those courses again, because my English was so poor. I didn’t want to repeat all those courses. I wanted to learn English and take the classes that I needed in order to graduate. So two weeks later, I alone was on a plane to Kansas.
To be continued...

Moving to the US (Part 1)

I moved to the US when I was 17 years old totally unprepared for what was waiting for me here. Life under the Islamic Republic of Iran was very difficult for us Baha’is, the largest religious minority in Iran. Baha’is were and still are persecuted by the Iranian government. Baha’i youth are banned from attending universities and colleges. If I had stayed in Iran, I would not be able to pursue my formal education. I will write more in the future about my life in Iran as a child and the circumstances under which I left Iran.

Growing up, I always thought that I would live in my own country, go to college there, get married and have kids there, grow old and die there. When our lives became difficult in Iran, it was my mother who initiated all the work needed for me to move to the US where my brother had moved to 10 years before. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to leave home. The thought of losing all that I was familiar with and was attached to was painful. It was with mixed emotions that I decided to leave Iran. During the time that we were trying to secure visas and such, I wished something would go wrong and prevent me from leaving Iran. I thought that I would probably have a better life in the US, so I couldn’t pass up the opportunity if it became available to me. But if the decision was not mine and the circumstances prevented me from leaving, then I would not have a reason to blame myself for making a bad decision.

Not knowing English scared me the most. I knew as much English as kids here, in the States, typically, know Spanish. I knew the English grammar and had limited vocabulary, but I wasn’t conversational at all. In fact the language that I had started studying and liked was French. French sounded much more pleasant to my ears than English. So the summer of my sixteenth year of life, I went from getting ready for my senior year of high school to getting ready to move to the US. I remember when school started on September 21st, I watched my classmates go to school with longing. I so wanted to be with them and graduate from high school with them. I left Iran in early October. During the last couple of weeks before leaving, I looked at everything differently. In my own way, I said goodbye to my house, my belongings, my school, the streets of my hometown, the shops, the trees, the mountains, my bicycle, which was my constant companion, my books and so many other things. I would walk on the streets, look inside the shops that I used to go to and look at the familiar people who worked there thinking that I may never see them again. I went to my favorite bookstore and left it remembering all the excitement that I felt every time I would go there to buy a new book.

There were so many people to say goodbye to. When I went to say goodbye to a couple who were good friends of my family, the wife said, “Soheila, marry an Iranian when you want to get married, don’t marry an American.” Her husband said, “She is going to America, what are the chances of her marrying an Iranian.” I smiled and said nothing. Marriage was the last thing on my mind, and American men were this incredible unknown. How things have changed since then, I have married and divorced two American men. I have dated many American men, and American men are the only creatures on the planet that I know very well, in fact too well. There is, absolutely, no mystery to them for me anymore. During the last days my oldest sister, Zhaleh, who has always been like a mother to me, since she is 20 years older than me, kept giving me advise about different things. Finally one day when we were in the kitchen of her house without making eye contact with me after a long introduction she said, “Soheila, make sure you won’t end up pregnant when you are all on your own.” I was shocked to hear those words from her. I knew how difficult it was for her to say them. Our culture is very conservative, and certain things are understood but never talked about. I was surprised that she felt that she had to verbalize those thoughts. And, I also thought that it was not necessary for her to even worry about such a thing. I was a very serious, driven and goal oriented young girl. I wanted to do great things with my life. I thought I would never be so irresponsible, or so immoral. Having kids out of wedlock was definitely considered immoral based on my upbringing. I smiled at her and said, “Of course not”.

When I was packing my belongings, I put all the things I wanted to take with me in my suitcase. It was hard to decide what to put in a single suitcase. I had about 10 books that I wanted to bring with myself to the US. These were my favorite books. I often wrote my thoughts about the story or the subject matter in the margins of the books I read. That was another reason that I wanted to take those books. I wanted to be able to know in the future what my thoughts were as a teenager. When I was done packing, my mom looked inside my suitcase and said, “You can't take all these books. We have to put this Persian rug in your suitcase. You might have to sell it someday.” She proceeded to take all of my books out of the suitcase and then put the small Persian rug, which was about 2.5 feet by 3.5 feet, in my suitcase as I watched sadly. I still have that little Persian rug. It is on the floor of the guest room in my house. It has a great sentimental value to me now, and I do not want to part with it.

The night before I was going to leave home when no one was in the house, I sat on the floor of our family room, cried and prayed to God fervently. I begged him to take care of me and not ever leave me alone. I knew I was going to start a new life that would be full of challenges and unknowns. I have remembered that night from time to time. I have thought about that young girl with her unshakable faith and determination to do everything right in life and the naïve belief that it was possible.

I left Iran about 3 weeks after my seventeenth birthday. The day of my departure was a beautiful sunny day with the temperature about 80 degrees. In my mind's eye, I can still see the events of that day clearly. On that day, I said goodbye to my family, got on a bus with my parents, left my hometown of Hamedan and traveled 8 hours to Tehran, the capital. The next day, we flew out of Tehran. My parents were, also, coming to the US with me. They were planning on staying in the US for a couple of months and then return to Iran. They wanted to come to the US for medical treatment for my father who was not yet diagnosed with prostate cancer.

I remember the hustle and bustle of the airport on that October day. The airport was packed with people. Hurriedly, we went through the crowd trying not to miss our flight. Soon I was seated in a window seat flying over Tehran. After we took off, I looked out of the window at the city that was getting smaller and smaller until I no longer could see it.  As the city disappeared, I felt a deep sense of sadness.  I had left my home and was getting further and further away from it.  I remember wondering when I would see it again and hoping that it wouldn't be long. But I knew it would have to be a long time before I could go back home.  I had just left a country whose government's official mandate was to persecute my coreligionists.  Life for the Baha'is was going to be fraught with pain and calamity.  Little that I knew that being back home would remain a dream that may never be fulfilled. I have not been back to Iran since I left it when I was seventeen. The policies of its Islamic government have not changed.

In the last days, as I said goodbye to friends, there was one person whom it was difficult to say goodbye to. It was the boy who loved me. My departure was the most painful for him. For the first few years of my life in the US, he wrote to me, called me and always managed to find me. Finally, after about 4 years, I told him that we should end our communication, because I wouldn’t move back to Iran, and he couldn't leave Iran. I have heard from friends back home that still after all these years from time to time he seeks out people who may have some news about me. He still lives in my hometown and has a business. I have wondered if I could have found a good life partner in him, since that is something that has eluded me in life. I sometimes wonder what he looks like now, what his life is like, if he is married, if he has any children. I hope and pray that he is happy.

To Be Continued...

Oh No, Please!

As I was reading an online publication last week, I saw the title, ‘Sarah Palin says “refudiate,” and creates a word controversy. What’s the big problem with refudiate?’ My first reaction was, “Oh my God, she doesn’t know that the word is repudiate and not refudiate. Refudiate is not a word.” I was shocked and somewhat disgusted. She had used the word in one of her tweets that thousands of people read. Again, I thought, “This woman is uneducated. The fact that she wrote refudiate and not repudiate indicates that she probably has not seen the word in the written form, which indicates that she doesn’t read.” Repudiate is not an obscure word. This woman tweets to thousands of people and doesn’t bother to do the most basic check in writing, the spell check. If she had checked the spelling of her writing, she would know that refudiate is not a word. I write a little blog that only a few people read and at the minimum, I check the spelling of the words I use. By the way, English is my second language, and I don’t aspire to run for the presidency of the United States.

In her response to the criticism that refudiate is not a word. She replied, “English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Got to celebrate it!” Yes, English is a live language. Words are created out of necessity. Some of the words created or used differently than what was originally intended are: email, google, input. We say, “I emailed you; I googled it; I inputed the data.” All these are new additions and new ways of using the English language. And, yes, Shakespeare coined new words, but his coining new words was not out of ignorance. He had characters in his plays that were supposed to be uneducated and used words incorrectly. There is a big difference here. Her response indicated that not only she is ignorant, but also she is insolent. If she had said, “I made a mistake and didn’t use the correct word.” I would think, “She is human, and she admitted to her mistake.”

When I first saw Sarah Palin introduced as John McCain’s running mate, I was hoping that she would be someone that I could come to respect and even admire. But during the months before the 2008 elections, I came to be disappointed by her lack of knowledge and simple and narrow views on issues. I remember when she was asked about what she read, I thought, “Name something, anything, Time, Newsweek, The New York Times...”. But she didn’t. Another thing that bothered me about her was her divisive way of talking in her speeches that were repeated over and over. She used phrases such as “good patriotic Americans” to refer to people who shared her political views, as though people who didn’t have the same views were unpatriotic. This sort of language only fuels hatred and judgment and is not constructive. Even her Tweet that had the non-word refudiate in it had a prejudiced tone. My issues with her have nothing to do with her politics, and they have to do with her person. It is obvious that she is not well informed. Her perception of things is limited and yet she is extremely ambitious. She didn’t even finish her first term as Alaska’s governor so that she could pursue her political goals.

America, today, is the greatest nation in the world. I have come to understand that this country has become what it is today, because of the vision and the foresight of the founding fathers and some enlightened early Americans. It is because of their insight that this country has such a strong foundation and a great system of laws. I have, also, read about the Women’s Suffrage in this country. The struggles of these amazing women who fought for their right to vote are no less than heroic. I have seen the rise of women CEOs, scientist and inventors in the recent history. I would love to see the first woman president in this county someday. I hope that she will be one that I can admire, respect and be proud of, someone with a great mind and intellect who is, also, educated. It is terribly jarring to hear the leader of the free world use words that are not in the English language. I’m still trying to digest president Bush’s use of the non-word “misunderestimated” in one of his interviews.

I'll write very soon

I have been so busy with life and work, but I will post something within a week.

On a different note: Today was a great day. I was so happy, productive and content with everything.