I am a walking piece of geography. I hold within me the borders of my country, Iran, infamously shaped like the outline of a sketched cat. I take the Caspian Sea in my belly, the Zagros mountains and the Damavand peak on my chest, and the intertwined leaves of the northern pine trees in the curls of my hair. I take a step forward, holding my mother’s hand, and we pass through a short glass door where we are greeted by a man in a khaki-green uniform who stares at us after opening our passports, takes a deep look into our faces, and gives us the hint that we can pass through. There, in the moment’s notice, with just about five or six steps, the border of Iran separated itself from the entire land that I encompassed in my fourteen-year-old body. We pass the Iranian border into the transit hallway of Tehran’s airport, and I can no longer see my cousin waving at me or my grandmother’s watery eyes.

It has been a long night of saying goodbyes. Earlier that night, my mother hosted her last family gathering at our home as a goodbye party just before we left for the airport. Everyone who was close to us was present; my favorite cousin, my grandparents, my uncle, a bunch of family friends, and many more of my countless cousins. Around the dining table, it felt like any other family gathering night we had hosted- the chandelier above the dining table shone like a majestic dress tying the happy voices and sounds of laughter together as it lit our home and our hearts. My mother and her sister bustled around adorning the dining table with the many mouth-watering dishes my mother had cooked. My brothers and boy cousins tried to crack open a plastic water gun to get it to work, while my dad and some family friends joked happily as they poured homemade wine into tall glasses. Behind the din, my grandmother’s voice called out, asking my mother whether this dinner called for the fancy silverware – reminding everyone that it wasn’t just an ordinary evening. Around the corner from the dining table, in our living room, however, you could see all the signs of a family about to leave their belongings and evacuate their home to move into a location far away. Furniture was covered under white blanket sheets, the rooms felt empty, painting frames were removed, and the six suitcases stood in a row in the middle of a now rugless living room- big, dark, and menacing.

Nobody entered the living room, and no one wanted to talk about the fact that later that night, at about 4 a.m., our family would be leaving our home and Tehran forever. No one wanted to acknowledge that my mother, who loved her kitchen to be sparkling clean right after each party, was going to leave everything as it was, dirty dishes in the kitchen, sink included, and leave the country! My aunt was to come back the next morning and clean the kitchen and the leftovers and that was to be the last visit from any family to our home for an unknown number of years.

Me and Leili, my favorite cousin who was about the same age as I, and also my best friend and partner in crime, watched the dining scene in silence, attached together as we normally were. We were the only two girls in the family and we always had ways to disappear from the family scene to talk about our secrets and our dreams.

Leili was sad. I could see it in her eyes, but she didn’t want to say anything about my impending departure to an unknown forever land named Canada. I was looking for a way to occupy ourselves and break the ice with Leili when the doorbell rang. I prompted Leili to follow me, and we ran to be the first ones to open that door. I pulled the door open and I saw one of my mother’s distant friends standing in the cold of that winter night. She had one of those luxury looking fur headbands on in dark brown which matched her extravagant brown fur jacket. She was wearing red lipstick and leather black gloves and in her hand; she had a box wrapped in newspaper. She gathered herself, looking suddenly half a head taller than a moment earlier, and she asked for my mother. Leili stepped forward and pinched me by reaching her hand to her back, a sign we had for knowing that the pinched person should stay quiet and go with what the other was doing. Leili told her that my mother was eating dinner and could not come to the door. The woman was surprised for a second, her black eyeliner seeming to grow longer as she hopelessly looked down to think. She reached her head to see me behind Leili, and asked: are you Sima’s daughter? I automatically said yes. She asked me to go closer, and I complied. As I stepped forward, I exchanged a look with Leili whose black eyes were sparkling with curiosity and fire. I knew she wanted me to go on with the lie and not get my mother to the door. The woman came closer to me and said: “my dear, I am in a rush- I can’t wait. I need you to give this box to your mother. She knows I was supposed to leave this for her tonight. She has to take this box to Canada with you to give it to my daughter. Would you give this to your mother as soon as I leave?” I nodded, still a bit awestruck. I was distracted by her lean hands reaching towards me with the wrapped box, handsomely covered as they were in fur and black leather. I took the box from her. She then said with despair: “please give it to your mom immediately- don’t you forget.” Then suddenly, her perfectly groomed eyes filled with water and turned into sad bowls of despair: “I promised my daughter I would send her a box from Iran. She…she misses home.” Her voice descended as it was beginning to shake- it was as if the moist redness in her eyes had turned into bits of ice inside her, falling into her diaphragm. Then, before we could conclude that she had started crying, she turned her head and quickly walked away down our street.

Leili closed the house door behind us, and I stood there with the newspaper box in my hand. We stared into each other’s eyes for a moment. I was thrilled that there was something that got Leili as excited and playful as she usually was on our last night together. Then we heard footsteps approaching-my aunt and my mother were walking towards us, so Leili pulled my hand and we hid in my brother’s bedroom which was the closest to the house’s entrance door. Leili turned the bedrooms’ lights off and carefully looked through the keyhole to see whether anyone saw us going inside that room. I loved her in moments like these. This was probably the hundredth time that I was seeing Leili doing the same action, but I could just not forget that this was the last time. Her shiny-soft and long brown hair cascaded like a halo around her face and down her back and made her look like an angelic being who might just sit quietly and watch life go from spring to spring. I knew her real self though, and Leili was no ordinary girl. She was smart, courageous, and indeed adventurous. I learned from her that being a girl does not have to look like how our mothers behaved. Not that they behaved badly. But me and Leili, we wanted to live differently from our mothers who in our eyes were living without their desires. They lived for others and we wanted to live for ourselves. We wanted to travel, to be stylish, and to experience all the things we were told were not meant for girls.

When Leili was convinced that no one had noticed us, she took the box from me and we went to the other side of the room where there was a window and balcony door facing the garden behind our house. In the weak light that we had found by the window, Leili stared into my eyes and said: “We need to know what’s inside.”

“What if it’s something private?” I asked.

Leili countered: “More private than our secret box?”

I took the hint. She was talking about the little box we had hidden in the garden behind my house which held all of my and Leili’s valuable things, and which I had no way of taking with me to Canada without my mother knowing. These were not dolls nor jewelry. These were objects and letters that Leili and I had gathered since as early as we could remember and we had hidden them inside a box, about the same size as the newspaper box that was dropped that night. We had been hiding the box in a particular hole we had dug in the garden behind my house since we were eight years old. We started hiding the secret box after our older brothers had made an attack to reveal its belongings to try to annoy us.

It was also about the time when the belongings of the box started to become secret in the sense that if found, we would get into serious trouble with our families. For example, butts of the very first cigarettes we had tried together, the sketch of a guy Leili had a crush on, and the diary in which we documented our every love story and first kisses. One time, just recently when Leili and I were about 14, we had lied to our parents that we were going to an after-school event at Leili’s school. In reality, we were going to a small gathering, invited by one of Leili’s guy friends. Leili’s school was next to a school for boys. Her parents let her walk from school to their home because it was hardly any distance. I had heard many stories from Leili about how when she and her friends got off from school, they met boys around the corners or at a park in between school and home. On that particular day to which the secret belongs, my parents dropped me near Leili’s school. When my parents’ car disappeared, Leili and I started walking to the gathering we intended to get to. Walking the streets of Tehran with Leili was the best experience a teenage girl could have- we laughed the entire way, making faces at bold men who looked at us with pride and lust, and we waved at the kids in the cars. Leili’s friends’ house was not too close and we got lost in the streets of the neighborhood as we were trying to figure out where this house was. Suddenly a man on a bike pulled alongside us. He called out to us, and as we turned to tell him off, we saw him exposing himself while sitting on a bike – he just started masturbating in front of us. Living in Tehran as teenage girls we got all sorts of positive and negative attention, but this was a shocking experience. We were terrified and stood there in shock not knowing what to do. The alley was empty, and it was only me, Leili, and the exposed man on a bike in front of us staring into our eyes and pleasing himself. Leili gathered herself faster than me, yelled at the man, pulled my hand, and we ran from the other side towards the main street. But before we had the chance to get distant enough, the man kicked the bike engine into gear and sped past, threw something at me angrily as he went up ahead. It was a brand newcondom.

That very condom had been inside our secret box since that time. Leili had picked it up that day- we were both scared to our bones, totally rattled as this was the first condom we had ever seen with our own eyes. We never shared the story with our parents because we were not supposed to be there in the first place. Leili wanted us to hold on to that condom because she wanted us to remember how it felt like not knowing what to do, feeling defenseless. She wanted us to always remember how we felt so that we don’t ever have to experience that kind of terror again. Strangely enough, the condom was a noble symbol to us-of the terrified little girls we were back then and the strong grown-up women we wanted to become one day. But this whole situation, and how we saw it, would be understood very differently by our families if our secret box was found by them. Their reactions would have real-life consequences for Leili and I, so naturally, we kept our box under the ground in our safe place, with extra precautions thrown in.

Inside the box, there was a little “happy anniversary” card that I had stolen from my favorite bookstore when I was 11 years old. I wasn’t proud of what I had done but I kept the card so I could one day give it to the love of my life. Even though it was very cheap to buy, I had slipped the card down into my pocket, because I had wanted to keep it for my love. Leili laughed as I did that, and she told me I am crazy to think that a stolen card could be part of a love story that has a happy ending. But then, like we always did for each other, she did the same thing. She too picked a card and slipped it under her sleeve. I did it for a future man, she did it for me. Leili eventually ended up losing her card on the way, but I kept mine for the both of us. As a shiny memory of reminiscence of my romanticism, her endless, law-breaking personality, and of course, our unworldly, crazy sisterhood.

One day, when I was staying at Leili’s house, she told me that the guy living in the apartment right below them had offended Leili. Leili’s room opened to a very narrow balcony- the same layout as the room of the neighbour guy living below her. He had one day noticed Leili and asked her out and when she had said no, he had made fun of her nose. Leili wanted to express her anger and we decided to throw eggs from her balcony into his. We went to my aunt's kitchen, packed our hands with eggs from the fridge, and to be discrete, we covered them with scarfs when passing their living room. We went to Leili’s room, reached ourselves as far as we could bend, and tried our hardest to throw the eggs in a way that not only they would land in the balcony of the neighbour below but to get them in deep enough to hit his room window. One after the other, we aimed the eggs at our target, giggling at the uncertainty of how far they had reached, hoping to create as big of a mess as we wanted. The next day, Leili’s parents received the complaint and Leili took all the blame for herself, just to protect me. Leili’s parents grounded her in her room for an entire week and had banned her from talking to me. Leili had cried endlessly in her room- I heard this from my mother later. I felt horrible for having gotten away with what we did, and I was in deep admiration of Leili’s sacrifice. All I could do was to write her letters every day, sometimes every hour, which I placed in our secret box every single day of that week. When Leili and I finally got together after all the banning and the grounding was over, we read those letters under candlelight an entire night- we didn’t sleep, we hardly blinked that night as we read each letter and talked endlessly about each minute that had passed.

That is what the secret box was- a collection of mundane objects and letters that to me and Leili symbolised our entire youth. We had a contract about who was to be responsible for holding the box. We had decided that until Leili and I turned old enough to rent our own apartment where we could freely locate our secret box on a bookshelf in our living room, I was to take care of it. Leili’s family home was very small. She also had a very nosy brother and no gardens where the box could be buried in the ground for safe-keeping. For that reason, we had made a pact that I would take care of the box. But the box was not small. I could not slip it into our luggage and surely did not want to spill its secrets to my mother. I was also quite worried about leaving it behind, so Leili had comforted me by saying she would try to sometimes take the spare house key her mom had for our home which she was supposed to use if there were any emergencies, and Leili could come and check on the box. But we both knew this was not a feasible plan- mainly because we did not know when her mother, or how often her mother, would come to check on our house. On the other hand, my family’s tickets were open-ended and there were no concrete plans for when we would return to Tehran. Me and my family were migrating to Canada for good! This was the plan my parents had hatched so carefully and meticulously for the past four years. My parents had shared that we would be visiting Tehran from time to time. However, to me this seemed unlikely. Looking at the way my mother had packed everything into suitcases we were taking, boxes that were to arrive shortly after we landed in Toronto, and boxes that were neatly packed into our storage, I could already sense that returning to visit Tehran now and again was a white lie only good to comfort my younger brother. So, in a way, the box could remain in our garden, be exposed or poked at, and neither me nor Leili would even be aware of what was going on.

Leili slowly started to peel off one side of the newspaper wrap of the box my mother’s friend had so intensely dropped off earlier that night. Leili said: “we will switch our box contents with what is inside of this. Your mother will never open this because she will think it’s what that woman dropped.” I instantly agreed. I was old enough to know that this was wrong, but I could not say no to sharing a new secret-a very important one- with Leili. This secret would accompany me to a new country that I knew nothing about and for all I could imagine, could be a land with no secrets, no memories, and no gardens. This was the perfect plan for now.

We opened the box, and there were only a few Iranian souvenirs inside- the common patterned and designed objects that showed bits and pieces of Iranian culture and arts. The things that any Iranian could instantly recognize as being made and purchased in some Iranian little market. A turquoise-colored salt shaker with little miniature drawings, a small key holder with a tiny doll wearing an Iranian traditional dress attached to it, a bracelet with patterns similar to a Persian carpet, a small mirror with Mina Kari (enamel work) in blue around it, a pack of dried mint, which is essential for any Iranian household, and a few other little trinkets that held within, a sense of life and culture in Iran.

Leili said: “It’s all the usual souvenirs … she can buy these again at any store and send it to her again with mail.” I looked at the little beautiful gifts with hesitation. Leili reassured me: “what are you thinking about? Can you take our box if we don’t do this?” We both knew the answer to that question. Leili said with confidence: “then, we don’t have a choice. It’s either our secret box, or, these which she can definitely buy again.” I took out the little doll to feel her dress and we noticed a small paper pocket- it felt like a letter. I turned to Leili to see her reaction.

  • “What do we do about this Leili?”

  • “If we do this, you can’t take anything from this box otherwise they would figure it out that we have opened it and emptied it. You are going to have to take our stuff out of the box as soon as you get there, and then seal it back like we never opened it.”

  • “Her mom knows she put stuff there… what if the letter is about something important?”

Leili stood up with frustration, she massaged her forehead as she usually did when she was thinking:

  • “Well, she can call her and tell her, can’t she? What do you want me to say? It’s not a perfect plan but it’s the only way.”

Then she got a little calmer- I knew Leili very well. I knew she was full of empathy, and I believed her when she said, this is the only way. She was right.

  • “This is the only way”. Leili said slowly. “You know that our box is not replaceable, but these gifts are, they usually are. Unless…”

  • “Unless what?”

  • “Unless you don’t care enough about the secret box because you are leaving.”

This was the first time Leili had directly acknowledged my departure. I could feel her pain, and I felt it too. Leaving Tehran, and my friends, especially Leili, was never my choice. I never believed that some random place on the globe that I had only seen pictures of could have been better than the life we already had here at home. No one ever asked me whether or not I wanted to leave, and now I had to leave everything behind that felt like home. Among the long list of the `things’ that “immigration law” would not permit us to take with us, according to our family lawyer, who, by the way, looked like the most charlatan person on the planet, was my grandmother. Although such an important part of our family, she could not receive a permit to travel with us. We also went through a long list of medical examinations, and my siblings and I attended the torturous English language classes from which we learned nothing. Too many obvious and subtle changes had already transformed the essence of our life ever since my parents started their immigration project and because we were going to Canada- a phrase I had heard a million times in the recent months and had hated every bit of it. No! I was not going to leave the secret box, and Leili’s hope, behind. The decision was made.

I pulled the box out of Leili’s hand rather aggressively, flipped it, and had all the things inside it dropped on the floor- the salt shaker cracked open just as Leili’s eyes popped out at the sound it made. I immediately got up, opened the glass door that led to the garden from the room, and ran towards our secret hiding place. I sat down on my knees and dug our secret spot with my hands. I could feel the moist soil sticking under my nails and pushing to get under my skin as I pulled the ground with my fists. Leili arrived shortly after me, and cautiously yelled:

“Are you crazy? Why did you throw everything all over the floor! It took me so long to pick them up, someone could have heard us”.

I turned back and gave her a quick look; and continued with all the force I had in my arms and dug the soil that held our box intact. Leili’s brown silky hair around her, she sat beside me trying to help me dig faster. I continued digging- not too long after we had our secret box out, we emptied our memories and objects and placed them in the card box that my mother’s friend had dropped. Leili threw the gifts and souvenirs, along with the envelope, inside our ex-secret box with a rush:

“There, we simply switched their places. It’s the fastest way we get rid of these now”.

We buried our secret box, that now held the souvenirs, as deep as we could inside the hole and before we pushed the excess garden soil on top of that box, Leili reached her hand inside the hole in the ground, took a fistful of the dirt, and poured it into the cardboard box that was to come with me to Canada and said in a meaningful voice:

“This way, wherever you end up hiding the box, you will have some of this soil that has been its home for this long.”

I always admired Leili’s sentimentalism- she was right. Having a fistful of the dirt from my childhood garden, the soil that had embraced me and Leili’s memories for so long, was worth more than anything in this world to take with me to Canada. We hid the box underground and went back to the room the same way we had come out and Leili carefully slid the cardboard box that now held our secrets back into the newspaper wrap. We then taped the box, and it was ready to be presented to my mother. Leili smiled at me, she handed me the box, and with all the enthusiasm in the world, she said “let’s go!”

I entered the dining room first- everyone was sitting around the table eating. My mother looked at me with surprise asking where me and Leili had disappeared to again, right at dinner time. I brought up my hands and reached the box out to her: someone was at the door, it was your friend, she dropped this for you.

My mother jumped out of her chair, she rushed towards me: “When did she come?” She grabbed the box from me and ran towards the entrance door. I yelled: “she left already!”

My mom asked with concern: “did she say anything else? Was this all of it?” I added: “Just this. She said to keep it safe in your luggage”. My mother moved the box in her hand and noticed the sounds it made as the objects inside started sliding from one side to the other. As my mother was about to put the box aside to go back to the dining table, I again yelled: “she made me promise her that you are going to put it in your suitcase right away.” My mother’s hand, which was about to place the box on a side table, froze for a second, then redirected back. She said: “fine, I’ll put it in now, so I don’t forget… she is an old friend” and she started walking to our living room where our luggage was waiting for us to leave for the airport.

Me and Leili supervised how my mother opened one of the suitcases and moved stuff around to find a place for the box. She said: “I thought it was going to be a light little box- that’s what I agreed to”.

Leili and I followed her hands moving inside the suitcase as she struggled to fit the box inside. She moved things around and again placed them back. The box did not fit. Finally, she announced: “It’s not going to fit, I have to put it in my carry-on”. Leili looked at me with worry- I knew what she was worried about. Leili wasn’t worried about what would happen when we get to Canada, and someone realizes the box is going to be empty because by then I would have taken what’s inside into another secure place that I would hide it in. We were both worried that if the box was in the carry-on, it would be easier to be found and more apparent to the eyes. But we had no choice. Finally, my mother placed the box in her carry-on and zipped up the suitcase, telling us to get back to the dinner table. All through the dinner, Leili and I held each other’s hands and exchanged happy looks as we both felt our bursting commitment to the secret box, and to our shared memories of our times together. This cherished box would accompany me to Canada, and this was a hint that the future too was going to be ours, just like the past had always been.

After dinner was done, it was time to leave for the airport. When I was closing my room’s door for the last time, I forgot to say goodbye to the four walls that had endured my solitude for so long. I forgot to sneak into my mother’s bedroom for the last time to see whether there were still new chocolate boxes left where she used to hide the excess chocolates from me. I forgot to smell the roses in our garden for the last time, and I indeed forgot to say goodbye to the little swing we had at the end of our garden where Leili and I had shared so many memories.

A caravan of three cars filled with family and loved ones followed our ride to the airport. We said goodbyes to each one of them at the airport more than ten times. Each time, we hugged each other, said nice things, kissed, and walked a little further. Then again, we repeated, hugged, taking in as much as we could from those warm embraces, some crying, some not, and again, found another reason to do the same as we moved just a few steps ahead. On my last glance at Leili, as we joined the line of passengers waiting to show their passports in order to get through security, I saw her holding my grandmother’s hand. We didn’t blink, she didn’t cry and neither did I. Leili leaned on my grandmother with no words and all we did, at the very last second, was share a shallow painful wave. It seemed like a poorly curated last scene to a 14 year long movie.

Sitting in the transit hallway, with my mother and father anxiously staring at the screen above, my brothers each sitting in quiet surprise, just like me. I can’t stop thinking about the last look I had at my grandmother and shared with Leili- I want to engrave that into my memory so well so that I could re-live that moment a thousand more times. I want to save the dirt that was still stuck under my fingernails from digging our garden the last time. A voice on the speakers announced something and my mother pulled the handle of her red carry-on, waving her hand at me telling me it was time to get on the plane. I look at my mother’s carry-on and feel a rush of something warm inside my heart- hope and love - for dear Leili. Our friendship was special, and it had blossomed through the little secrets we had shared with each other. As I say goodbye to Tehran, I carry with me across international borders, our biggest secret so far. This thought was exciting and strangely calming that everything will be just fine.

My family and I got out of the plane at our destination 14 hours later- so far, the only thing different about the Canadian airport from the one we had departed from in Tehran, is the language, which is foreign and American. The waiting times, too, are at least three times more than those we experienced at the previous airports. This is the Canada- I repeat to myself in my head. This is it- Tehran was gone, Leili was far, and I was lost.

We had landed in Toronto and as first-time entrants to the country, my father tells us that we need to pass through extra customs- “just this very first time”. The line-up seems endless. We had already passed through a number of security cameras and customs and by this time, I was no longer worried about my secret box. It was safe, inside the carry-on, and no one had even taken notice of its existence so far.

Our family finally gets close to the little replicating booths that seem to be the last stop, when an officer from behind us calls our family into a room that is to the right of the area we had been waiting in for the past few hours. My father is surprised, and my mother is concerned. The officer asks our family to step aside and follow them inside the room. Inside that room, there is a small baggage screening area, no seats, a white wide desk, and two other officers. I don’t understand what they said with so much seriousness to my parents, but I deeply regret all the playfulness I had exerted in my English classes that my parents had signed me up for in Tehran. I left those classes as bare-naked with English as I went in and now, I am already in the country of that language and I know zero ways of communicating with anyone.

After a short conversation, the officer points towards my mother’s carry-on. I can only understand their gestures which imply they want to screen the carry-on again. My heart drops and I taste its misery in my mouth as my mother picks up the little red suitcase and puts it on the rail for the security screening in that little room. With the press of a button, the officer slides the suitcase on the rail and into a small tunnel, then suddenly stops when the suitcase reaches the middle of the little tunnel. No one says a word except for the officer who shows something to his colleague on the screen, and they both shake their heads with what seems like disapproval. Within a few moments, they pull the carry-on out and unzip it wide open on the white table at the end of the screening rail. My mother keeps asking my dad if he can understand what the problem is. My dad has his eyes fixed on the suitcase, as do I, and remains silent. One after the other, the officer’s masculine hands in white gloves, goes through, below, and aside from the things my mother had so neatly packed. My mother is unhappy that he is transferring the germs from his hands onto her personal belongings, but I, on the other hand, am about to have a heart attack as I see his hands in that particular piece of luggage. His hands picking out the items from the suitcase and then putting them aside feels like a level of invasion of privacy that no security measures could justify.

Finally, the officer’s hands pull the newspaper box out. The officer asks my parents something, my dad follows his question to my mom: “what’s inside that box?”

My mother shakes her head in confusion, and then explains that she doesn’t know and she is doing a friend a favor: “it should just be a few little souvenirs from Iran,” she says with confidence. The officer is out of patience; he shows my parents something on a piece of paper and then he peels off the newspaper wrap from the box and opens its cardboard lid. As soon as his hand pulls out the lid, a cloud of dust, with chunks of dirt, along with rocks, letters, a condom, and a few other mixed objects are let loose on the security desk. There it is, my failure to protect my past with Leili, my childhood exposed, my secrets outed, Leili’s memories poured on to the table without a thought. The officer looks at the desk with estrangement, shifting his judging eyes towards my mother who slaps her own face and bites her lips as soon as she sees the condom- a gesture that Iranian women had been using for decades to express a mix of shock, embarrassment, anger, and maternal concern. A cold sweat starts to break into my face as I slowly turn my eyes to see my parents’ reaction before I am caught by my mother’s sharp stare, which tells me that she has very well figured out what has happened. My mother is furious, and her enlarged pupils are the harbinger of the storm that was to come as soon as we leave that room. She says nothing meanwhile to protect my dignity and that of her own. My dad is still confused and is trying to respond to the many questions the officer is asking one after the other (or at least that is what I thought- he might have very well been repeating the same question over and over again). I watched the officer’s white-gloved hands dive through the dust from the garden hole Leili and I had dug in our garden in Tehran. The officer picks up the condom, the card, and the letters one by one and then places them back again on the desk in the midst of the settling dust storm of the garden soil. He runs the empty box through the screening tunnel again, and then another time. When the box has reached the end of the rail for the third time, I assume that the purity of the box is defended and that the officer is done with confiscating the belongings of Leili’s and my secrets. I take a step towards the desk where everything is lying on top of each other so that I can gather what I can and try to protect them from further being exposed by my parents’ naked eyes. Suddenly, as soon as my feet get an inch closer to the desk, the officer exerts something in English, in a voice that is not just very loud but commanding- he is not yelling, but his voice makes me hold my breath as I freeze in my place to comply. It gets worse as my dad’s voice reaches me right after, making my ice sculpture of a body melt: “get back, they are not done.” I feel so small that I could very easily fit into the little confiscated secret box. My mother picks this moment to tell my dad, that those things aimlessly and carelessly lying on the desk, are actually mine. My dad screams in surprise: “a condom?” as his eyebrows jump to the roof making his eyes pop as he looks at me with flames of inquiry that captures the confiscation energy of all the security screenings we had gone through in that trip all at once. His web of shocked expressions is only cut short as he soon realizes that three pairs of Canadian officers’ eyes are fixated on our interaction. In a way, the exchange of attention in that room, from me to the desk, from my mother to my dad and him to me, and from the officers to the newly entering family seemed like a poorly orchestrated musical scene. My older brother laughing, my younger one-half aware of what is going on, my and Leili’s truth has become the exposed story to all.

The officer finally gives up. He and his team are now convinced that whatever they thought was going on was a false alarm. The officer then points to my mother, implying that she can put back the things of her carry-on into their place. I also step forward- this time with caution. I reach my hands to pick the things, the little words that appear from mixed sides of letter papers, the little card, and the bits of memories lying around on the surface of the desk. My mother, as angry as she is, hands me the empty card box and the newspaper wrap letting me know that I can put everything back while disciplining me with a low voice in Farsi in that Canadian security room: “you are going to be the one to look into my friend’s daughter’s eyes and tell her why the things her mother sent her are not here. You know, they have been apart for five years? Her mother couldn’t get a visa to visit her girl and she can’t go back to Iran because she is a political refugee.” The guilt was bolder than the turquoise blue embedded into all the gifts that the girl was supposed to receive from her mother and now laid underground in our garden in Tehran. I wish I had at least read the letter so that I could tell her what the shape of her mother’s handwriting now looked like. Nevertheless, I certainly did not ever suspect that I would have to get disciplined by my parents that early on in our new life- we hadn’t even entered Canada and here I am, being myself, getting caught because of the things I held inside and the things that had sprung out of that cardboard box.

My mother nudged me: “Hurry up, the officers are waiting, put everything back into the box so we can leave this room.” But how could I put everything back into the box? The “everything” was the essence of my secrets with Leili. The things we had saved for so long with so much effort, the little mysteries that attached me to Leili, and her to me, and us both together to Tehran. All this was now swirling in the air of that security room like the little drops of dust.

I pick up the letters, the card, the rocks, everything I could grab, and as I am deliberating if I should pick the condom up that was so rigidly displaying itself with the shiny blue sealing on the white desk, I decide to leave it to protect my dad’s pride. That condom was my pact with Leili to never be scared to raise our voices, especially against rude and unruly men; but at this moment, it seems that the best decision is to be scared one last time. Plus, if I left it here, maybe my parents would forget about it out of embarrassment and shame, which oddly enough, guided many of the Iranian parent-child interactions. As I am about to close the lid of the box to be done with the task and, as soon as I turn to my mother to hand her the box, I hear the officer’s unavoidable voice, saying something in English. I turned towards him, not understanding the language, but thankfully his human body language conveys what he was trying to say as his hand in white gloves pointed to the condom: “don’t forget that.”

It feels like the volcano of Mount Damavand- the most famous and highest peak in Iran- had erupted over me after more than seven thousand years of silence- I am sure I turned as red as a tulip. There is now no way of hiding from that shiny blue thing anymore as the officer’s voice had filled the room. I admire his alertedness and portrayal of control which resemble the crime fighting characters my brothers and I had seen in Hollywood movies. However, for a little piece of blue plastic wrapped condom, his attention was an overreaction. If this was Iran, the officer would have gotten the hint and would have thrown the condom inside a trash can after we had left the room given that as a young girl I was not supposed to know what a condom is, let alone owning one. I am not sure which reaction I hate more. All I can understand is that if I don’t pick the condom from that white desk, my family would not be entering our new home- Canada.

At all costs, I avoided any eye contact with my parents as I reached for the condom. My mother, trying to fill the void of that silenced-static air, says again in a rush: “hurry up, put everything back into the box and let’s leave.” Behind that sentence, I could hear that she felt ashamed, that my actions had put her and my dad at a cultural crossroad so early on. I could hear my parents’ pride and honour had been tarnished.

I put the condom with the rest of the things back into the box as my tears drop one by one on the soil of Tehran which now lay in chunks and bits of dust on top of that white desk in the security room. My Tehran is so thinly dispersed on that security desk that I can not pick her up as my hands could only catch the bigger objects. I take the box with me, and I leave behind about half a million feelings and memories in the particles of my childhood garden’s dust that remain on top of the white security desk and are destined to be wiped off. This is the last time I cry, as a teenage woman, on the soil of Tehran.