Only This Beautiful Moment by Abdi Nazemian EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available For Free Download
- Author: Abdi Nazemian
- Language: English
- Genre: Teen & Young Adult Fiction on Prejudice
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
Moud
2019
Los Angeles to Tehran
Being gay on the internet is exhausting. That’s what goes through my head
as I de-gay my social media. Gone are all my opinions about Drag Race
and whether straight actors should be allowed to play gay roles. Gone is
every picture I’ve ever posted of me and Shane kissing or holding hands or
ironically painting rainbow flags on our chests (ironic because we’re not the
kind of gays who post thirst traps, not because we don’t respect our flag).
When I’m done deleting everything, all that’s left is a void. It’s like I have
no past. Just possibility.
There’s a knock on the door. “Mahmoud,” my dad says from the other
side. He’ll never call me Moud, no matter how many times I ask. He just
doesn’t want to acknowledge the real me.
“You can come in.” Ever since my dad walked in on me and Shane
studying on my bed together, he won’t enter without being explicitly told
to. We were fully clothed, by the way. We had open copies of trigonometry
textbooks in front of us. And my dad was still shocked. Maybe because our
feet were bare and our toes were touching. Maybe because Shane was
wearing a T-shirt that read Make America Gay Again. Maybe because
despite having come out to him two years before, he had neatly
compartmentalized that conversation away into the part of his brain where
he stores the things he never talks about. Like me being gay. Like my mom
being gone. Like my grandfather being sick. Deny, repress, avoid.
Well, he eventually told me about that last one. He had to before it was
too late. I guess, given my dad’s history of emotional evasion, I shouldn’t
have been surprised that he hid my grandfather’s cancer from me until the
very last minute. Hiding pain is a deeply Iranian thing, and my dad is
deeply Iranian.
“Dad, I’m alone. You can come in.”
He opens the door and peeks in. He hasn’t shaved, which for him is a
sign that he’s not doing well. He thinks we look like terrorists when we
don’t shave. “We have to go back to the Pakistani embassy,” he says. “Your
passport is ready.”
“Oh, wow.” Something about the knowledge that there’s an Iranian
passport with my name and picture on it stops me cold, like a piece of paper
has already changed me. I’m still staring at my computer, at the blankness
of my social media profiles. I guess I expected the process of wiping away
all those memories to be traumatic. Technically, I’m giving up my freedom
out of fear that some Iranian authority might punish me for it. But it’s the
opposite. Because the memories that matter feel stronger inside me the
moment they belong only to me and not to some data center in the cloud. In
a strange way, by giving up what should be a piece of my freedom, I feel
more free. I wish I could talk to my dad about this, but I don’t talk to my
dad about anything.
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