I joked with a friend that I had been Beijing’ed. My family and I moved here last June, and ever since, I’ve felt my connection to the Iranian diaspora slipping–this week hammered that home. My mistake, missing the ever-important kick-off event to the Nowruz season, wouldn’t have been a thing back in DC. But, if I’m honest, this disconnect isn’t anything new. I mean, we grew up in rural Kentucky. So, it felt like everything Iranian happened in a vacuum. While we knew we were Iranian, my father’s maintenance of our cultural touch points was basically limited to rice with every meal and facilitating a love of radishes.

“Japanese,” she said in an aggressive whisper as she leaned in, making it almost conspiratorial like an inside joke, only I had no fucking clue what she was on about.

She’d said it before, too, with her wide hyena-like grin. Those first few times, I laughed it off. What else was I going to do? Her crazy eyes exposed little to no depth other than malice. Was that malice directed at me? It wasn’t quite clear.

The shift in topics helped, kind of. But in every quiet moment between then and now, it returned. This deep sense of emptiness. There was a realization that my race to write every fucking thing I see and tell it to the whole fucking world was some sort of desire to fill that space. To engage in ways that I usually would be but through different means.

They loved their father. There was no doubt about that. They had forgiven him, but some unhealed wounds continued to fester even in adulthood. Those open emotional scars made their father’s transgressions hard to forget. But it was their father’s refusal to acknowledge the pain he had caused that compounded chinks in their psyche and kept their relationship with him lukewarm in the best of times. Amir’s revelation, though, was yet another reason for Cyrus to figure out how to spend more time here. He and his siblings needed each other.

The cobblestone streets of Regensburg’s Altstadt clicked and clacked under the steady footfall of Cyrus’s desert boots. He hated wearing them when he traveled because they were more cumbersome than his driving loafers. But he also didn’t know what he would be doing or where he would end up. Besides, it looked like rain, and no self-respecting son of a bourbon heiress should ever be caught dead wearing loafers in a downpour.