Letter XIV

It all began one night. You came into my dream and never left. I was walking along the shore. My mother and my grandfather held the photograph of the young girl dressed in grey and murmured her short will under their breath:

Greetings to my father, my mother, and all my family. I bid farewell to you all and ask your forgiveness. I hope that God guides all young people to the straight path. In my final moments, I ask God to forgive me.

You rose from the surface of the sea and reached the roof of the sky. You climbed higher and roared up to the dark clouds. Foam and blood seethed within you. Then you came to a halt at a single point, as if you had noticed me.

I could feel your mysterious, indescribable presence roaring: on one side toward me, and on the other toward the darkened sky, yet never descending.

My mother struck the earth with her feet and cried out to the image of the girl in grey, which she held in her arms:

“Where are you?”

Little by little, she faded away.

I searched for my father but could not find him. I could hear his voice calling my name in that same cheerful, excessively alert tone of his:

“Elham!”

Yet I still could not find him.

I was afraid you would come and destroy us all. Beneath your black shadow, I felt myself growing smaller and smaller, until I awoke. I thought it was over: only a nightmare, nothing more. But you had found me, and you would no longer let me go. Dream after dream, you came, roaring louder each time, never descending, until fear took my breath away.

Sometimes you appeared from behind the tall, misshapen towers that had taken the place of forests. Sometimes, on an endless shore, you became a vast whirlpool, drawing everything toward yourself. Sometimes you rose behind the great window of the room I shared with my sister, and I thought, Any moment now, the glass will shatter, and you will tear us both to pieces. Every night. For months and years, you came and went.

Rarely were you beautiful, as you had always been when I loved you in childhood. I would sit facing you and let my imagination wander. I imagined that, in the future, like the seafarers, I too would go searching for unknown horizons.

Once, when I was on the shore with everyone else, you decided not to remain in your place. From a height in the sky, you descended and crashed down, swallowing everything and everyone around me. I watched you carry the bodies away and deliver them to the shore like helpless dead fish. I ran. I took shelter, but you came closer. I woke with my heart being torn from my chest.

Ten years passed like this, until my life changed. My hard days gave way to a love-filled happiness, and I found myself again in life’s goodness. But you did not let me go. You always found a way back in. You caught me on the uphill road leading to my father’s house. You came for me in the elevator. You put me behind the wheel of a car and left me lost among nameless highways with neither beginning nor end. You appeared in the guise of strangers and chased me until I felt you were about to take my life. Even if I woke up, another dream was still to come.

What was the cause of your presence? Perhaps it was that framed will above the grey-clad girl’s head, which, in the very heart of my childhood, introduced me to the secret of dying at another’s hand.

Perhaps it was my mother’s whispers about her life and my father’s, about how they might never have existed, and therefore how easily I too might not have been in this world.

Perhaps it was the experience of living amid fire and smoke, blows and falling, revulsion and pain, confusion and wandering: an experience that slipped down from the foothills of Tehran and reached all the way to other borders.

After a while, I stopped thinking about you. So much terror overtook me in waking life that nightmares no longer had any meaning. If you came, you were only a continuation of wakefulness. Blood splashed so high that it reached the middle of the sky, rising above you. Purity and longing were torn into such fragments that there was no room left for your roar. I stood stunned, and for a long time you did not come to me. Silence fell. It grew cold. The nights passed without the slightest dream.

Yet, while awake, I could not make peace with the thought that this was life: this same vast, terrifying wave that I did not possess even an ounce of courage to face. I was cowardly and powerless. I was not strong and steadfast like the grey-clad girl. I could not hurl myself against the wall of this mass of death and say:

“Come. Fight me. Drown me, if you can!”

For so long, I tied myself in knots and wrestled with my own thoughts. In the end, I decided to build a small boat of joy and set out upon the water.

Then a dream came along. You were there, radiant, crystalline, transparent, and made the most beautiful scene for me. Gently, you asked what I wanted. I replied:

“I love the sea and its waves. I still want to go there, see the shore and confide in you. Could you not frighten me so much?”

That night you did not roar. But on the nights that followed, you began again.

Time passed over me with its bitterness and sweetness, while the nightmares continued, in sleep and in waking. Amid it all, I gathered whatever courage I had within me so that, at last, I could stand before you. Come into my dream tonight. Rise up. Howl. From the deepest place in my being, I am telling you:

Let me go.

The world wears no cheerful face. But that is no reason for you to remind me of this darkness every night. In this one life, at least, it is better for a person to dream of life’s joys, and not to have the dread of death and the cruelty of the world rise before them every night, without end.

In my small boat, I have gathered joys, each one a tender meaning of being alive. I want to ask you not to shatter them. Do not leave me drowned and broken apart in your merciless turbulence.

The desire to search for the future was present even in the grey-clad girl’s will. After her, everything grew infinitely darker, and she never reached what she longed for. Yet, despite all this cruelty and death, is there not still some beautiful, unknown horizon to seek beyond you?