Restless Me - The Journal of World Travel

When I visited the original city and citadel of Bam, which was built in the 12th century, I stayed for hours without seeing another person. Its vast six-square-kilometer collection of clay and straw skeletons of homes had, at one time, contained between 9,000 and 13,000 people. Walking through the abandoned metropolis was like walking through a Hiroshima-like tracing of another people's existence; it was at once beautiful and ghostlike, both unsettling and familiar.

I came back from my trip exhausted and ill from a mysterious illness that had plagued me since Esfahan, and which had made it increasingly difficult, if not impossible, for me to retain any liquid or food. I fell into the bottom bunk on top of the covers. Many hours later, I woke up to see a familiar face; it was Jasper squatting next to my bed, a concerned look on his face and a hand on my shoulder. Somehow, it seemed, we had found each other again.

When I got up, the owner of the guesthouse, Akbar, was serving dinner on the large courtyard that overlooked a sunken garden. The table and bench where we ate were surrounded by hammocks that Akbar -- and guests, too, if they so desired -- slept in during the hot summer months. During dinner, Akbar, a former English teacher, said that although he was free to leave Iran, he chose not to. He could not imagine a better existence than what he had created there. With the smell of honeysuckle floating in on the cool evening breeze, it was impossible to imagine any falseness in that statement.

Akbar's teenaged son, Mohammed, whose laugh seemed as if it was trying to break free of its bodily host, taught me how to properly pronounce the infamous "Marg bar Amrika," or "Death to America" slogan, which could be found stenciled on walls throughout the country. It was graffiti, though, that was bereft of any real menace. Its careful practiced perfection betrayed its originator as being someone less motivated by unbridled hatred than by a government paycheck. It had no more malicious heft to it than Mohammed's contagious carbonated laugh.

Later in the evening, when the other travelers had broken apart and regrouped in smaller knots about the courtyard, Akbar stopped me on my way back from one of my numerous trips to the bathroom, to speak with me alone. He did not ask me, but rather told me, that he knew I came to Iran for a reason. I told him that was true, but that I did not know why. Akbar, with his large, thick, square glasses and one leg crossed over the other, waited patiently for me to find my answer.

I thought back to the cold January day in Chicago on which my mom went with me to the post office to mail my first attempt at an Iranian visa. She had also been there years earlier when I was mailing job interview thank-you letters, and I could not help but wonder, while we stood in line that second time, whether she was aware of the careful unraveling of a sweater that was occurring. I know I was not. It wasn't until I was thousands of miles away, on a trip that everyone had warned me against, that my choices, my desires, however wrong everyone else may think they are, however wrong they may eventually turn out to be, are mine to make.

And I knew what I had to do when I returned. I would quit my job and begin again, this time to write. And I did, albeit very slowly, glacially even. But it was there, the movement, and this time, it was mine.

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ANDREA FISCHER lives and writes in San Francisco, California. She has written for the Dutch magazine, Milieudefensie, San Francisco City Sports and the San Francisco Chronicle. Her work has also appeared in such literary publications as Devil Blossoms, Black Buzzard Review and Creative Juices.