She has always been a spider web to which I stepped ineligible to choose. Paranoid as she was, irresponsible and lazy all she did through her life was finding new pills and drugs for sleeping more and throwing at us her lashing words. I was born when she was twenty seven and introduced to her sleeping pills when I was four. At twelve I was introduced to a whole package of new drugs my father brought to her. I could see how our lives were falling into that terrifying black hole of indifference. And I cried asking her not to take those pills. She wouldn't listen. Instead she took more. Ever since, I've been looking after a place to run away from that purgatory. There was a library near our school which was my sanctuary. There I found a book written by a journalist. I still remember the red cover of the book. I'm not sure but I think the book's name was In the Wind and it was about a twelve-year old boy who had killed himself with fourteen hits of machetes in their bathroom tub. Though I didn't go home before I finished the book and got home late, nobody asked me where I'd been. And now it is years that I'm used to this indifference. In fact, when I read Kafka's Metamorphosis' last paragraphs I understood what I'd meant to my family all these years. I could imagine how happy they could be without me.
About the same time, when I was at guidance school, there was this teacher who all students loved because of his patience and also for he respected everyone. He taught religious studies but more importantly he was a great rhetorician who had a great influence on me especially. When he talked, I felt mesmerized. Once he told us about the resurrection day and quoted a narration: if man knew, laughter would wither on his lips like water in the desert. After this class I went to him and asked for some books about resurrection. For about a year and a half I borrowed his books. The images those books gave me were horrifying and each time I jerked off I thought of myself as evil. In my prayers I cried like hell. But then again I jerked off.
And night after night after night I saw one same nightmare. I walked through a narrow long lane with grape leaves on both sides crawling down the earthen walls while at the same time at dawn I saw two bodies tied upside down with one leg to the branches in a long cold distance and when I wanted to run away I got caught in the black cloths of the dead bodies and blood welled up from the earth with Arabic words which where sword-like and pointed, sharp with pieces of human body on them. The more I tried to free myself from the cloths the more I felt trapped.
High school was a chance for me to get away from that atmosphere. And though my friends were more or less the same, I got to read Molavi, Shahnamah, Nezami and other Iranian classic literature poets and works which opened a totally new window to the world. I didn’t say prayers or take fast anymore, though I still felt somehow guilty and believed in God. When recalling those days, I see light. What kind of light, I don't really know or maybe I never contemplated on it. There's something about light, there's something mysterious about light. And it's something I found when I didn't listen to pop music anymore and started listening to Iranian traditional and folk music, which reminded me of my childhood, when I used to sleep with a mixed tape of country, folk and traditional music and led to playing music. However I always thought it was so late. To buy both instruments, my Setar and my Tombak, I worked after school for my father believed if you wanted something you had to work for it. For the tuitions also I helped my father with registering the names and identifications of prescription papers.
This light, whatever it was, faded soon when I read Hamlet and the Blind Owl of Hedayat, after which I could say yes I was a modern literature worm. I, then felt something heavy, something like Shostakovich's number eight quartet which I heard years later, that belonged to the years I had lived but not felt and that was like having to decide in a second, a second equal to a thousand years and a night. But I had to. So I did. You always do. And I chose not to believe in God. And I chose to face politics. And I chose literature to be my future. And so I started cutting classes, going to reformers speeches and events. And I chose to read everything that was literature and put aside everything else, anything that was not literature. And well it was right on time, for it was my first time I could vote. And it was clear to everybody who we will all vote for.
