A Love Story That Began in Tehran

Today marks fifty years since my parents met.

I think about their young love. How they met at a party in Tehran because one of my dad’s best friends is my mom’s first cousin. I picture that night so clearly. Music. People dancing. A little drinking, a little smoking. The kind of party you’d find in any major city in the world. People dressed how they wanted. Lived how they wanted. Life felt expansive then.

My mom was wearing her mother’s necklace that night. The letter B, for my grandmother’s first name. My dad’s name is Bahram. She told him she wore it because fate already knew they were going to meet.

Did fate know everything else too?

The blood. The tears.

The leaving in the middle of the night, four-year-old me in tow. Traversing dark, snowy mountains on horseback. And never coming back.

There were no sanctions then. Our Iranian passports meant freedom. One U.S. dollar bought about seven tomans. Today that same dollar buys around 146,000. The contrast feels unreal. People lived. They had normal problems. The kind you complain about and then move on from. Not survival. Not terror. Not this.

Fifty years later, it is a bloodbath. And when people think about Tehran, they imagine a third-world hellscape. They do not know how beautiful it was. How magical. The Paris of the Middle East.

I don’t think about Iran every day. Mostly I talk to my aunts who still live there. Sometimes I wax poetic. Sometimes I say I wish I were there. But it’s one of the few things I’ve learned to compartmentalize just to function. A part of myself I subconsciously buried for survival when we moved to LA. So that I could assimilate.

I don’t often let myself feel what it means to live in essential exile. To be away from a place that lives in my cells. I don’t think too long about how my body reacts when I imagine going back. How adrenaline floods my veins because it is always a coin toss. Maybe everything will be fine and I will go and come back like a normal human being. Or maybe I will end up in jail for being queer. Or for something I wrote. Or something I believe. Or something someone in my family believes. Or nothing at all.

It is always a toss up.

So I watch from thousands of miles away. In horror. And in hope. I text my parents questions no one can really answer. Do you think the regime can actually topple? I try to shut out the noise. The opinions of greedy white men who want war, want land, want oil, and call it liberation. I have seen what their version of freedom looks like. It always costs too much blood.

Sometimes I wish I were there. In the streets. Chanting. Screaming. Standing shoulder to shoulder with my sisters and brothers who refuse to disappear quietly. And then I ask myself honestly. Would I even fight? Would I have it in me? The regime is violent beyond measure. They spill blood as easily as I spill tears thinking about it.

I am filled with so many emotions that contradict each other. Hope that maybe it could be different in my lifetime. That these psychopaths might finally fall. And then fear. Who replaces them? Will the Iranian people be safer or worse off? I fear for my family. I am always afraid of war. Of densely populated streets turned into targets. Of warmongering idiots who think sending troops will somehow save anyone. It never does. It only multiplies the suffering.

There is so much blood. So much fear. So much violence.

And then there comes a moment when there is nothing left to do but pray. To activate the merkabas. To speak to the guardians of the land. To ask for protection. For wisdom. For the ancestors to step in. To ask for something better than what history has handed us so far. To stay connected to possibility, even when it feels naïve.

So this is my ask.

Keep my people in your hearts. Do not look away. Imagine Tehran not only in grief but in beauty. In light. In music. In laughter spilling out of open windows. Imagine safety returning to the streets. Imagine dignity restored. Imagine a future where young people fall in love at parties without knowing they will one day have to flee.

If you pray, pray for Iran. If you meditate, include her. If you believe in energy, send it. If you believe in action, speak up where you can. And if all you can do is hold the image of Tehran whole and alive and free, do that.

Sometimes imagining is the first rebellion.