Letter VII

Look how time flies. Thirty years have passed since I wrote you that letter, believing in my raw, naive way that I was merely being honest. It was the very letter whose buried truth you dismissed without a second thought, leaving me to regret ever setting pen to paper before the ink had even dried.

I was young and unformed then, and the young have yet to learn the terrible weight of the unvarnished truth. We live with truths that are constantly, often deliberately, swept under the rug, until our eyes and ears grow accustomed to neither seeing nor hearing them. Until, that is, a moment comes when a slight nudge pulls back a corner of the shroud, much like the sudden exposure of a woman who has been veiled for years. The onlooker is seized not so much by the beauty or delicacy of what is revealed, but by a deep, visceral tension at the sudden sight of all that had been hidden.
I did not know then how deeply a person can be rattled by the sight of their own true reflection in a mirror. I did not know how greedily, and with their own two hands, they will claw to pull the cover back over the truth, or how far they will go to preserve that illusion, even to the point of destroying the truth itself. I did not know that even when an unvarnished inner reality stands right before us, begging to be seen, a person can turn their back on it and speak of it more loudly and boldly than anyone else, while being utterly fragile and helpless in its presence. I did not know that this kind of confrontation is so unbearable for someone unaccustomed to wrestling with their own soul that they will shatter the mirror and break the person holding it. They will accuse the truth-teller of lying, snap their pen, and poison their spirit with self-doubt. They will do all of this with meticulous care, just so they never have to face the shadows lurking within.

Three months after I wrote that letter, you were admitted to a London hospital, awaiting open-heart surgery. Everyone around you, wholly unaccustomed to seeing such frailty and physical weakness replace your usual commanding presence blamed me for you lying there, tangled in tubes and machines. It was then that I finally understood the full depth of my foolishness. You never shared the contents of that letter with a single soul, yet somehow, everyone knew it existed. It was the very letter everyone claimed had lodged its shrapnel in your soul and brought on your heart attack.

And there I was, standing at the precipice of my youth, confronted by a terrifying reaction whose internal origin I couldn't begin to fathom. Sitting on a bench beside Hyde Park in the heart of London, in the pouring rain, I made a choice: I would never write a letter again. I washed my hands of writing, because I had come to believe that words, when forged from the naked substance of truth, are more destructive than they are connective. Having paid the price of honesty through the punishing guilt of your illness, I rebuked myself: no truth, no matter how grand, is worth making someone sick; it is not worth breaking them. I snapped my pen and warned my restless mind: you do not know the truth, so you have no right to speak it. From then on, I too learned the art of concealing the truth with subtlety and sophistication, simply because I had no idea how to handle the reactions it provoked. I, who had been hardwired for directness and honesty, became overnight a creature of pretense.

And now, after long years and many rises and falls, life has asked me once more to write a letter. It is as though fate, with a wry, cynical smile, has dragged me back to that same frightening place, to those very same lines, to the unresolved knot between you and me. It is as if the ghost of that first letter had watched my clumsy, youthful struggles among its tangled threads, waiting in some quiet corner of time for me to finally ripen into the maturity needed to read it again. I accepted the challenge, choosing to use it as a crucible to test myself.

Now, as I sit writing this, I must confess that despite thirty years of resolute silence, despite my vow never to write you anything of substance again and to leave you to your manufactured peace, the questions in my mind never truly faded. Though decades have passed, I still remember how desperately I wanted to ask you back then: how is it possible to spend a lifetime in the arena of words, speaking constantly of courage and the hunger for truth, while inside the private chambers of your own soul, you fall into such a panic at the sight of raw reality?

Through all those years of silence and unanswered questions, I was at a loss for what to do with the very lessons you had taught me. In that heavy, resonant voice of yours, with that piercing gaze, you used to tell me that a human being is their own worst enemy out of sheer incompetence. Incompetent when it comes to facing themselves and admitting their own flaws. Incapable of shoulder-heavy responsibilities to pull themselves out of the mire, and too weak to nurture the seed of their own potential. This exact incompetence, this weakness, is what makes a person a coward. A coward usually hides, but when the source of fear is within, you cannot run. Instead, you learn to turn inward, compartmentalize the truth, and bury it with masterful skill in the dark recesses of your psyche, until even you can no longer see it and are no longer forced to tremble before it in paralyzing dread.

You taught me all of this, and you used to insist upon it: a human being can layer filter upon filter over their own eyes and ears to delete, censor, or distort raw reality at will. A person who lacks the stomach to confront their own interior learns the "courage" of living without fear only by hiding the truth. Just as they learn how to put the truth to sleep so it doesn't disturb their sweet dreams. You told me to watch for these filters in myself, and whenever I laid a truth before you, clear-eyed and unadorned, you would encourage me with a smile. You were always so proud of my unfiltered directness, except in those rare moments when, out of the very habit you fostered, I held that mirror up to your realities.

As if facing that reflection was simply beyond the capacity of your soul, you would suddenly fly into a storm of irritability and bad temper. Disguising it under sophisticated banners like "critique" or "intellectual challenge," you would drain the life and color from my freshly sprouted views. You would maneuver and hold forth in the arena of words until your position prevailed, and with that verbal victory, you would push the mirror away from your eyes. How remarkably inventive the human creature is when fleeing from itself.

In those days, my young mind hadn't yet connected the dots between your reactions and that mirror. I was under your spell, enchanted by your truth-seeking persona, blind to the heavy shadows and intricate layers of your inner panic. And so, gathering what little boldness I possessed, I reached for the pen rather than the tongue, and wrote that letter. I believed that if you read my words in private, away from the heat and noise of a face-to-face confrontation, you might actually take me seriously. Looking back, I see how much my subconscious was acting like a child searching for meaning, relentlessly chasing your approval. The approval of a man who was the most precious person in the world to me, yet whose satisfaction was so remote, so unattainable, that no one could ever truly please him.

I learned later that when whispers of my stroke-inducing letter began to circulate, you told everyone it was a ridiculous, worthless piece of paper, not worth reading, let alone falling ill over. Perhaps everyone believed you and stopped blaming me, but I knew you too well. Well enough to know that you had read that letter, read it carefully, and more than once. I could tell by the way your gaze shifted. You had read it, but because seeing your own blind spot was more than you could bear, you used the weapon of denial to bury me alongside yourself in that dark pit of concealment.

For a long time, I carried a strange, agonizing contradiction. On one hand, I suffered from being buried alive by you; on the other, I felt a twisted sense of pride because I knew you well enough to see your hand at work. It was as if, from the very depths of that burial, I had carved a small peephole into your soul, quietly watching you. Perhaps it was during those days that I tapped into a strange compassion for you. I decided I wouldn't fight you over those truths. Instead of rebelling against the mentor who had denied me, instead of carrying heavy weapons that only exhausted me to no purpose, I laid them down. I channeled my energy into a quiet, peaceful entry into your hidden world. Those years of patient endurance brought me close to your pain, and a deep tenderness began to bloom within me.

Through that feeling, I came to realize that you were trapped in a agonizing, terrifying rift: between your high ideals and gentle, justice-loving nature on one side, and your paralyzing wounds and unresolved trauma on the other. How exhausting it must be to be forever condemned to play the flawless hero.

Yet, even alongside this undemanding compassion, threads of resentment remained, occasionally surfacing to leave a mark. I wished that when faced with my pen, instead of doubling down on your pride and performing ironclad courage, you had simply admitted to the facade. If you had just acknowledged your terror of watching that unblemished image collapse, you would have made my own path so much smoother. But you chose the well-trodden path. The very same easy exit you had always condemned ordinary, shallow people for taking with such biting judgment: stoning the messenger to escape the terror of the message, all to keep a deluded illusion of courage intact.

It is true that destroying me as the narrator drove me into a decades-long silence, but throughout all these years, I never once doubted that what I wrote was neither worthless nor deniable. It merely dragged you into a foggy, unfamiliar territory you had no desire to enter, a place that forced you to face your own inadequacies and held your unhealed wounds up to the light. You wanted to be free of those wounds forever, and you thought you had found that freedom in the slogans of truth-seeking and claims of absolute capability. What a treacherous, dangerous duality that was.

Did you know that fear and insecurity are contagious? When you accused me of lying, even though I had no doubt about my own truth, you planted a seed of self-doubt in my soul. It grew alongside me for years, gaining height and strength, until I woke up to find my world unsteady and dim. In every glance, I searched for a hidden agenda; in every word, I braced for an imminent accusation. My filters multiplied by the day. The fear inside me, under the guise of self-preservation, spun a protective cocoon around me so I could move through society with a capable, beautiful exterior. Yet day by day, it pulled me deeper into isolation, until my outlook on life and the people around me was completely clouded by fear and cynicism.

Now, writing this letter thirty years later, I ask myself: how did I break free from that deeply ingrained fear and doubt? You may not believe it, but I freed myself from that cocoon using the exact same analytical methods, the same process of stripping away filters, the same unsparing gaze that you taught me. Armed with your own intellectual inheritance, I walked through the heavy shadow of your presence. And what a grueling rite of passage it was. It cornered me in isolation and forced me to shed my skin until I could find strength, a real one this time. A strength that gave me the capacity to carry the weight of my own flaws and internal wounds.

When you apologized in those final days before your departure, I wanted you to look me in the eyes, but your gaze no longer held that formidable power. Dim, tired, and listless, it felt as though you were apologizing not to me, but to the sheer weight of all the shrouds you had drawn over your own life with your own hands. You never specified what you were sorry for, but it no longer mattered. I was no longer that young youth thirsting for your validation or nursing a grievance, waiting to cast blame. I had outgrown those resentments, both large and small. In my isolation, I had grown up. I had mapped your behaviors and reactions carefully, and now my mind could connect the dots with absolute clarity, drawing wisdom from the pattern. I learned that when a person is overwhelmed by trauma, by humiliation, by the ordinary agonies of being human (and who in this world isn't?), they must not smash the mirror standing before them. I learned that it takes true bravery to look into that glass. That one must be able to endure, just once, the sharp pain of seeing an ugly wound, rather than fleeing from it and scratching at their own soul and the souls of everyone around them with the claws of denial forever.

In the hospital, hooked up to those cold, soulless machines, with your fading, fragile gaze, your old, idealized self completely shattered, you asked for a pen and paper. With a trembling hand, you wrote: "Have your wounds healed?" My heart wrenched, because I knew there was nothing left; you were drawing your final breaths. You had reached the end, and you could no longer hold your covers in place. They were slipping away, leaving you exposed. I swear I caught a glimpse of your fragile, naked interior in that moment, even though the others gathered around your bed saw only an exhausted, dying patient. They assumed your question referred to the physical scars on my hands. But you and I, in that room filled with the monotonous pacing of the heart monitor, both knew exactly what you meant.

In response, I wrote: "Wounds don't heal. They close so that we don't die, but the scar remains forever." And you, in one last, desperate effort, one final struggle to preserve that manufactured world of denial, rallied the last of your strength and wrote: "Don't bring up the one who wounded you!"

You caught me off guard one last time. How deep, how ancient, how stubborn is the root of denial in the human soul, that even on the very threshold of death, a person cannot bring themselves to let it go. Perhaps the capacity to blind oneself is the final weapon of the living, one we only lay down when we die. After that, if there is a moment left, it must be entirely filled with the forced, undeniable sight of the truth.

Years have now drifted by, and the winter of my life has set in as well. I have traversed the lengths and breadths of this earth, journeyed back and forth through the corridors of history, and moved among crowds, only to accept a bitter truth as part of the human destiny: that taking refuge in the shadow of denial, maintaining a facade of strength, is the easier, more alluring, and convenient way to belong to the herd. Conversely, to live courageously with the naked, unfiltered truth of one’s inner self is a harrowing, rugged path, fraught with exhausting trial and bound for isolation. Yet the hardship, the ache, and the bitter sting of this solitude are far more exquisite than that easier road. For in the end, the rocky terrain ceases to be an obstacle and transforms into a sanctuary, not only for the truth within oneself, but for the wandering truths exiled in the world around us.

Whether it was out of my profound reverence for you or a rare stroke of cosmic fortune, I know not; but I set foot upon this second path. Instead of fleeing from my terrors, I learned to gaze into my own depths and confront them, even when it brought an agonizing, soul-crushing pain. My fears have not departed; they have not vanished. They linger still, all around me. But we are no longer adversaries. Now, I stand eye-to-eye with them; we have grown intimate, familiar, and fond. In these days of loneliness, they have become my honest, silent, and fiercely loyal companions, even amidst the clamor of the crowd. Wherever I wander, I march with a legion of fears, who proudly introduce me as their friend to whatever new terrors await. Neither the old nor the new hold any dread of me. I hold them into my arms, we share a laugh, and then we part ways, until our next gathering.

Zahra Bagheri
New York , June 2026