I was forced to leave my country at the age of 13 1/2 years. It isn’t that I don’t love living in my adopted home, Berkeley, which has housed and nurtured my wounded heart and questioning mind, but the memories of those early years have etched themselves permanently in my mind.
The smell of the air was different, the taste of the melons, the sound of laughter, the street signs that were all in Persian. Of course, every part and every memory has a different feel to it, but there is also a unifying sense to it all. I visited my homeland twenty years after I left it, and looked at it with the eyes of an adult who has benefitted from the experience of many other perspectives, but my heart lept over the twenty years and found my 21 year old cousin, bouncing on my lap where I had left him.
And on a car ride to the famed Persipolis, standing tall after two millennia, with the taxi’s radio blasting a mournful Haydeh song and, in a distance, the sheep grazing in the Zagros mountains, herded by nomads whose ancestors had herded the ancestors of those sheep before Persipolis was erected, I felt grounded again. It makes no logical sense but that ancient land will live in my core, despite all I will love and experience in the future, forever.