I rush to the quai in the Gare de Lyon in Paris. Flinging my small case on the train, I jump on. Moments later the train pulls away along the track, heading to Nice.

Slumped in my seat, I can relax, breathe, and observe those already settled in my compartment. Business people, couples, and single travellers surround me. One small figure catches my eye—a lady in her early sixties, dressed in a double-breasted camel hair coat, green beret, and smart brown leather gloves. She is elegant, with red lipstick. The slight nervousness of her fidgeting hands is familiar.

You haven’t been home in a while. How long, I can’t quite say, but long enough for the stillness to solidify. Dust amasses discretely, until one day it forms a visible shell. I hear you brushing it off surfaces, coughing, groaning in disgust. There are many surfaces. But you’re determined.

My parents raised my brother, Mark, and me in Raleigh, North Carolina, an airplane flight from any relatives. My mother’s sister lived in Oakland, and her brother lived in Los Angeles. We took one family vacation to each during my childhood, because saving money for the future was more important than knowing our cousins.

I’d waited an eternity, but I’m finally holding my brand-new Deutsch Reisepass. It’s stiff and unyielding, unlike my mother’s and grandparents’, which are worn, faded, and pliable. If I handle those old passports too roughly, the prominent swastika and red J on the cover may turn to dust in my hands. From dust to dust.

When I returned to Tehran for the first time, twenty years after my family’s escape from the Islamic Theocracy, I was in love. I can’t write an exhaustive list of what I was in love with, because I was in love with everything. I was in love with the taxi drivers. The surly ones. The quiet ones. The inquisitive.

A few months after moving to the U.S. from India, on a weekly trip to the San Jose Flea Market, I walked into a store selling art reprints and found an artist whose work would take me by the hand and show me around our new home.

I pulled the glass door toward me and walked into the Cord Camera store. The Man sat across from the entrance, on the other side of a glass display filled with shelves of Minolta and Canon SLR cameras. He read the newspaper and his pasty, distended arms looked like alabaster bookends holding the news captive.

Grandma Helen was my fancy grandmother. Born in 1909, she was the firstborn child of Julius and Mary Nelson’s five children. Her tall, blue-eyed father liked to tell her that her birth brought him luck. After Grandma arrived, Julius went from selling newspapers on the Lower East Side to learning the trade in his wife’s family’s coat business.

My family lived in a village outside of Dohuk, Iraq (Kurdistan) in the fall of 1988. I was 1.5 and my brother was 3 weeks old. Neighboring villagers rushed to come tell us that Sadamm and his army was on the move and we needed to leave. We left with the clothes on our backs and fear in our hearts. The journey on foot over the treacherous mountains seemed to take forever. We finally made it across the border to Turkey and settled in a refugee camp in Mardin, Turkey.