A Profile on Amin

As a follow up on the “woes that lead to the present”, I decided it would be smart to give a summary of things so that I can write more on how I’m feeling now.  In order to for you to follow how I’m feeling now, you need a bit of context for when I start referring back to people and relationships.  The first person you know best, because I have quite a few posts on Amin in this blog already. 

Here, however, is how our story ended.

Over the Christmas holidays, Amin had gone to Tehran, the capital of Iran, to make inquiries about his compulsory military service.  He didn’t want to tell me anything about what had transpired until we were back together in person.  I don’t think it’s the first conversation we had, but I made him sit down with me in that first week for sure to break the suspense.  The news was not good: he had hoped to be exempt from service, but he found out that was not possible; the service was not for two years, but for three; and it was not in another year or so, but he needed to be back in Iran circa September of 2013, a mere eight months away.  I asked what this meant for us, and he said he didn’t know.

This was all very abstract for me while he was trying to figure out what to do.  I encouraged him to talk to a therapist to sort out what it was he wanted, because he was feeling so torn.  In the meantime, I was doing what I could to make him feel supported, and to try to move our relationship forward.  I was not trying to go leaps and bounds, but I was trying to avoid stagnation, which is where he was happy to place us.  We had a few wonderful moments, including a couple of purely magical dates I would have loved to recount every detail of especially when they were fresh in my mind.  Now I am in the time of summary, however, and not colours.

The final conclusion he came to was that it was too hard to have a long-distance relationship with me.  This is the thing he had asked me a few months prior, if I would be willing to do this.  I had been open at that point, and now my heart was so open and so willing.  He was not, though.  He was in the process of letting go of everything.  He was letting go of me, he was letting go of the place he wanted to live (Canada) and the career he wanted to have (working in the industry.)  He felt that Allah was pointing him towards living in Iran, and he was depressed because that is not what he wanted for himself.  He was depressed openly and giving up on all of his dreams.  He could not work as an engineer in industry without serving the Iranian government, so he knew he would have to teach instead.  He knew it would be hard to restart the immigration process in Canada after three years away; he no longer wanted to try.  It was too hard, he said.  It was not where Allah was leading him, he said.  “If only I’d gotten my permanent residency,” he would say, or, “If only I’d met you earlier”, as though this would change something.  So he showed signs of still fighting it, and wanting things to be different.  The one that really astonished me is how he took his French courses obligatory for Quebec immigration up until he left for Iran.  Why do that if you did not believe in coming back?  So many hours of his life wasted on that.

He did not want to give up his family.  How could I blame him?  He would never be able to set foot in Iran again if he skipped his military service to stay in Canada and stay with me.  I could never ask him to do that.  He explained to me that they would never be able to get a visa to get out and visit him.  The government knows how to use pressure tactics.  Could they not meet in Turkey? I wondered naively.  The Turkish government would likely turn him over as well.  There were so many things like this that my mind just spun through after he broke up with me, because he had done all of his deliberating in silence and without me.

My mind was reeling.  I wanted to do anything not to lose him.  At least, almost anything: when T told me I should marry him and that this could help his immigration status, I balked.  What if I wasn’t ready to marry him?  We had dated for four months.  How could this be my life?  How did I get stuck in a Nicholas Sparks film?  I proposed to him a couple of months after the breakup to go to Iran too for my gap year, and learn Farsi properly, understand his culture better, see where he comes from.  He refused.  I’m sure he was right, but at the time everything felt completely arbitrary.  I had freedom of movement unlike him, so why should I not take this important step to be closer to him before I began my graduate degree?

I lost my mind in that gap year.  I was also on a medication that was making me depressed as a side-effect, so it was a terrible combination of factors.  I had little hope for anything at all, including my own future.  I was sure I had lost my soul mate.  I had soul-level pain; that is the only way I know to describe it.  I had the feeling of the rug being pulled out from under me, and like my insides were completely gutted.

I still have to mostly pretend like this is not something that I experienced.  It was a film I saw, something I read.  It was not my life.  When I think about it more than just in a cursory way, I still cry.  In all this time, I couldn’t even bring myself to write it in my blog to give some kind of conclusion to this story I had been building.  Writing this tonight is very painful.

My only hope is that this will help someone out there trapped in a Nicholas Sparks film instead of their own life.  My only hope is that this will help me start turning the page for my own life.