black and white and sort of stylized

Illustrations from the lovely and moving Persepolis 2 by Marjane Satrapi. Someone recently told me I remind him of an Iranian girl he used to know. He said it had nothing to do with the veil, but rather some expressions. I think there could be a likeness after all.





Some scenarios are so beautifully profound and romantic… until you have to live them yourself. Pain is so edifying in novels, the heroine so much the better for having loved and lost. In real life, they say it’s the hormones, it’s the pregnancy, it’ll pass. If they are right, if it is the pregnancy, what better or realer reason could there be for feeling everything twice as strong? If everything seems to take on more importance at a time like this, it’s because everything does take on more importance at a time like this. A terrible importance. And we’re talking about things like having someone’s hand to hold one weekend and no one’s the next; having someplace to go, a place where you are wanted, and noplace at all; knowing what you want and realizing in a half-lit churchyard, for what seems like the first time but can’t be, that they are all the same things you can’t want. I’d been in that churchyard before.

He didn’t even ask me where I’d been. He just laughed like it was all just a silly thing that happened. I said, only because I promised my mother I would, “Do you want to talk about this?” He said, “You had your chance to talk about it last night,” when we sat through a painfully long and embarrassingly short dinner together, in silence, at Erganos. But even then, I tried.

I had just spent an hour sewing the cat-eaten couch back together, and I wondered out loud if the buka would take one look around and wish it could go back where it came from. I know that was not the most sensitive way to put it. It wasn’t about our finances; it wasn’t about his ability to provide or to protect our material possessions from the cat of mass destruction. I was really just asking if the buka will like us. It is something of concern to me.

Now we’re in a phase where we don’t talk at all. I’m holding my tongue, thinking very carefully about what it is I want to say, or rather, what it is I want to do. He believes in routines. He won’t invite trouble, or emotion, which to him are the same things.