STORYÂ OF MY STORIES
Sweet sadness fills your heart when entering an intimate space you left a long time ago. As if you travel through time. The memories stored in your body are woken up. You see the old space with new eyes, behind your glasses. Maybe you are taller, perhaps just a little. Your brown hair is gray now and your belly is out.
You've been around the world, lived a whole life, played many roles. Yet, when you come back to this space, to this particular part of the world, your heart fills with sweet sadness.
You hardly know the place anymore. Except for a few old streets, a monument here and there, otherwise, it feels like a new country.
You realize you are a visitor who happens to know the language. Even your language is frozen in time. There are new vocabularies and slang you don't recognize.
You wonder, what happened to the first 18 years of your life here. Why does it feel so foreign and yet so familiar? You left 40 years ago and never came back until now. Your roots dried up.
You arrived here so excited, looking for familiar faces and places. But, people you knew so well, moved on. Your memories are like pictures, frozen in the frame of time. The place does not recognize you anymore. The narrow streets with gardens and tall majestic trees now house significant tall buildings. The engineers and MBAs are Uber drivers. Women not only dress differently but altered their faces and hide their sadness under beautiful masks.
You are not one of them anymore. Although you share all the facial features, you smell, walk, and talk differently. They can tell you are not one of them. Your presence has an accent.
You feel sad and lonely. You are looking for a way to connect to your roots, shake them down and wake them up. You must find a way to connect back.
Then you decide to go to distant past. You start walking the streets of the old town. Your body starts circling, your neck and face are going up, down and sideways looking for something you lost. You are looking for that old elementary school. You find it. It is still there, hidden like a treasure, in the narrow streets of Shemran Ghadeem. The iron gate is still there, protecting the school from half a century of changes. You are walking into the front yard. It is not a school anymore. But, the colorful mosaic with your school name is still on the exterior wall: "Dabestan Vedadi دبستان ودادی".
On the second floor, you recognize the window to your first-grade classroom. Then your roots start growing from the ground underneath your feet, and are taking over your body. Now you are standing there, in the middle of your schoolyard and crying. A little girl is looking at you through that window. She is smiling at you. There, right there, is where you learned how to read and write. You learned the alphabet; you learned how to read for the first time. The first word was Ab آب– Water, Nan نان– Bread. You held a pencil in your little hand, and you wrote: Dad gave water. Baba Ab Dad بابا آب داد .
You can't stop crying, and you can't explain why. You go back to the basics of life like water, like bread, father, and mother. You go back to the very elements of sounds, words, sentences, and stories. "Yekee Bod Yekee nabodd Gehraz Seda Hichcheez nabod" یکی بود یکی نبود، غیر از صدا هیچ چیز نبود . That is when the world of "Once Upon a Time" started, and you became literate.
A week later, you are on the plane, flying back to your adopted home. You are not the same person anymore. You carry the sweet sadness feeling in your heart. The children's stories are rushing through your head. They want to be told and insist on being written in your native language. It has been 30 days since you wrote in Farsi. You are back to basics again. You feel compelled to write about sounds, alphabets, words, and tell their stories to Farsi speaking children.
Cheh چه, Bon بٌن , Eyn عین, and Tashdid تشدید are my stories only written for Farsi speaking children. It is theirs and theirs alone.
Sorry, I can't translate.
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