The Weight of Elsewhere 'Part Two'

To: The Immigration Office Date: November 11th, 2024, 9:15 AM Subject: Application #47291 Focus: Limbo To Whom It May Concern, I am writing from the plastic chair in your fluorescent-lit waiting room, where time moves like honey and everyone speaks in whispers. The woman beside me clutches documents in three languages, her wedding ring sold to pay for translation fees. Her child draws houses with chimneys that look nothing like the flat-roofed homes we left behind. I count the price of belonging: $500 for forms that ask if I've ever been a member of any organization that might threaten your national security. (I want to write: "Only the poetry club, where we threatened nothing but silence.") Today I measure another birthday that dissolved like salt in September rain, and I calculate what it costs to exist in the space between countries, between currencies that fluctuate faster than seasons. --- To: My Reflection in Foreign Mirrors Date: December 25th, 2024, 3:25 AM Subject: The Lie I Tell Myself Focus: Self-deception Dear stranger in familiar skin, Exile pretends to be a choice. I tell myself I left by wanting, that my need for elsewhere was desire, not desperation. But in the quiet before dawn, when memory meets the fading dark and I taste the metallic fear of another rejection letter, I remember the faces that will never write back— the poets who spoke in rhythms too dangerous for morning news, the singers whose voices fell silent mid-verse, the dreamers who dared to imagine different endings, their names now whispered in languages that forget. *(Words are forgotten, but pain remains)* Sometimes I catch myself responding to "How are you?" with "Fine, thanks" instead of its Persian equivalent. and wonder which version of myself is lying. ---