“We start with some nice deep breaths.” The Teutonic embodiment of nineties feminine perfection and I bend at the knees and arc our hands above our heads. Behind her, the aquamarine water of St. Barts, or terracotta rooftops of Prague, depending on the day of filming. Video cameras crane to capture her every lunge and squat. I mimic her from my parents’ basement den, her moving image beamed to me from a wood-paneled eighties television that hides the sump-pump hole in the concrete floor. Behind me, sticky seventies photo albums of camera-flash red-eyed babies, long-forgotten Atari cartridges. We are on two sides of a mirror..

The bathroom light hummed above me, too bright and too sharp, like it was trying to expose something I was not ready to see. Two pink lines. My breath caught in my throat, suspended in the thick, humming air. My hands stayed steady, but something inside me shifted; a hairline crack under pressure. I stared at the test as if staring hard enough might undo it, might turn the lines back into the uncertainty I had been clinging to. For a moment, everything went still. Not peaceful stillness, the kind that comes right before something breaks. It was the kind of stillness that feels like a held breath, a pause in the universe, a moment when the world waits to see what you will do next. I remember thinking, this cannot be real. And then, almost immediately after: Of course it is.

I was called sand.

My family and I didn’t travel to beaches full of it. We couldn’t. Being Iranian in the 1980s and 1990s came with a label: terrorist.

My nickname didn’t come from a beautiful beach.

It came from hatred.