The Price of a Possibility
The story of how I dealt with grave injustices and traded a comfortable life in Iran for a chance to live here
"Are you absolutely crazy?! Get out of that bastard’s apartment! To hell with Europe! Come back to Iran now!"
My best friend's voice crackled through the phone from Iran. I'd just told him about the latest beating. Until that night, it had been all verbal threats and sexual violence. But now he was hitting me too.
The man who trafficked me into Europe wasn't some street criminal. He was a respected businessman cutting billion-dollar deals. A year ago, when he found me starving on a street in Seoul, eighteen years old, hollow-eyed, and without a legal pathway to stay out of Iran, he'd helped me out of what seemed like compassion. One call to his connection at the ministry of foreign affairs, and I had a visa.
His colleagues didn't know. His wife and three children didn't know. None of them knew he was sexually into teenage boys like me. He used to take trips to southeast Asia to satisfy his cravings, but now he had me, imported and imprisoned in a spare apartment. The fact that he held my legal status in his hands—the power to send me back to die in Iran—had emboldened him to abuse me in any way he wished. A C-Suite executive by day, a modern slaveholder by night.
That quiet apartment was in the south of Warsaw. Every day after 6pm, my heart would race. That's when he'd use his key and walk in. This man was almost three times my age. I was afraid of going back to Iran, I had no other legal path anywhere else. So I couldn’t turn down his requests, and he knew it.
What was terrifying was that this didn’t even have the respectability of a business transaction–he seemed to enjoy exercising his unlimited power over me. There was no way I could behave to avoid his derision. He called me a pig and threatened to have me deported to Iran if he saw even a speck of dust on the floor. And when I bent over the ground to clean it, he’d start kicking me with his heels.
"But Khash... I can't. I can't come back to Iran. I can't. I just can't," I replied over the phone. I was stuck between the fear of Iran and the fear of staying. So I froze in place.
Until one day, the trafficker got even more violent—he put his hands around my neck and tried to choke me to death.
I ran out of the apartment. It was 10pm. But for inexplicable reasons, the security guard called the police on me. Making that night one of the worst nights of my life.
After that incident, I packed my bag. I packed it even before I had a ticket. I went online and bought a one-way ticket to Iran. At least in Iran I didn’t have to endure rape. At least I wouldn’t have the police called on me if I walked at night. I was dying to get out of the hell I was in.
I had promised myself that as long as I was breathing, I would never come back to Iran. But it was the summer of 2019, and I boarded flight PS752 to Iran.
I landed in Tehran. The air felt like déjà vu wrapped in dread. The pictures of the Supreme Leaders served as an eerie reminder of where I was. I closed my eyes and looked away from anything that reminded me of the Iranian regime. I just wanted to think of my loved ones. I rushed through passport control and took a taxi directly to my friend, Rana.
I got off at our usual meeting spot: a hidden corner in an open-air building complex in Tehran called "ASP," where we were relatively safe from the Guidance Patrol.
I saw her. My heart broke to pieces. She had aged a decade in a year. Underneath her eyes were deep-set black circles that faded into her tan skin.
She had recently been expelled out of Tehran University for "lack of modesty"—her headscarf had fallen back just as the head of security was walking by. She was studying French literature, which would have made her eligible for a scholarship in France.
Her future was now in ruins, and a part of her had visibly died. Although perhaps there was still hope; underneath her sad eyes, she still had that same deep-set smile.
"Pouya?! Was it that bad?" she said, looking at my bony face with deep concern.
"It's never so bad with an angel like you in my life," I replied, holding back my tears.
We didn't care that it was a crime. We hugged. We couldn't wait any longer. Tears started streaming from both our cheeks. I cried for her situation, and she cried for mine.
I saw how dry her lips were. "Stay here. I'll be right back," I said.
When I entered the convenience store to buy a drink, a surge of reality hit my face. Everything had tripled in price. Some items were completely gone. The Iranian currency had fallen to a quarter of what it was worth just a year ago. Iran's GDP was halved in less than two years. The effects were now visible.
I felt a rush of regret about coming back to Iran. I didn't want to witness my loved ones drowning in poverty.
"How are my parents doing?" I wondered. "They must be really struggling..."
Later that day, I took a bus to my hometown. When I arrived, I saw my 5-year-old brother among hundreds of people in the bus terminal. Ignoring everyone else, I ran to him and picked him up, crying in his arms. I saw in his glistening eyes how happy he was to see me again. He enthusiastically showed me how he could now read numbers. He looked even more beautiful than I remembered. There was something within me—a fatherly force—that wanted to stay in Iran and raise him, to get the pleasure of experiencing and helping his growth.
I noticed my dad's car. A Toyota SUV. He also had an iPhone. Both were unimaginable luxuries in Iran. We had new furniture, and my mother for the first time was wearing clothes that fit her.
I learned that my father had received a big promotion at "the Foundation," where he’d started working a few years ago. With a cheery tone, he told me he could now open up a spot for me there. I could even take one of the company cars, if I wanted. “If you’re loyal to them like me, the perks of working in the Foundation are really high.” He said, a gleeful pride present in his voice.
My parents seemed to have forgotten the fact that they’d disowned me for leaving Iran. They were impressed that I could live on my own in a foreign country and pay for my own visa. They had no idea what kind of price I was in fact paying to stay in Europe.
My head was spinning. So many things had changed. For the first time, I could buy anything I wanted in the grocery stores. My future was secured; with my father's high position, I didn't have to worry about being poor and unemployed anymore.
Life was different. I didn't even have the fear of being arrested for being with my friends anymore because my father had a private villa and allowed me to hang out with my friends there, relatively safe from the police.
The fear of living in Iran that had been chasing me in Europe was gone. I had no more reason to be afraid of staying. The nightmare apparition that was Iran had turned into a soft blanket dream. For the first time since I could remember, I spent a few days enjoying my life.
A few days later at night, I was going through my old belongings in my bedroom where I caught a glance at my box of sentimentals that was secured behind my bookshelf. I sat on the ground and started going through it. I saw my handmade objects, letters and objects gifted to me by my friends, and printouts of my favorite images on the internet.
I laid them out. A picture of New York's skyline. Covers of my favorite English albums. My first written paragraph in Korean. My first homework in English. A picture of an iPad 2. A promotional picture of Google Glass. A sketch of the Golden Gate Bridge. And at the very end of the box, underneath a birthday letter from Rana, my most valuable belonging: something I had forgotten—my drawing of a scene from the movie Ratatouille. Remy, the protagonist, smiling as he looked down at the Paris skyline.
That night, I thought long and hard about who I was, and what I wanted from my life.
I was going to stay and be hired by "the Foundation," the economic arm of the IRGC. I'd be driving to that tall building everyday, serving terrorists who worked to erase all signs of the West from the Middle East. Just like my father, I’d be taking orders from hairy lifeless losers who hated beauty, until I became a hairy lifeless loser myself.
On the other hand, I had a ticket to a different world. I looked at the visa on my passport—still valid. A world that was ugly, but still could give me a chance to work in Silicon Valley, to make friends in New York and Hong Kong, to finish my university and continue learning. To live not like a thief, but perhaps one day, like a foreigner. To add something to this world. To have a future to look up to. And there was a remote chance I could be a part of that.
Why did I leave Iran? Was it only because I was poor? Or was it because I wanted to be a part of something bigger, to live in a country that actually produced something, to spend my life working on a project I could be proud of?
And if I couldn't live the life I wanted, why was I living anyway?
The next day, I announced to my best friend, Khashi, that I was leaving.
He looked at me like I was crazy. He said I had everything I needed: a job, a car, money, a villa.
I told him that Iran is not my place, that I wanted to live my life abroad.
He said, "And it's better to be a slave to an old man?!"
"No," I said, "but there is a chance that after I finish..."
"What chance?!" he replied angrily. "They're treating you like a dog! What are the chances they'll let you stay after you graduate? They'll kick you out once your classes are over! Look at you! Your eyes, your bruises, your spine! You threw up blood the other day! It's as if you're back from a prison camp! Don't you see that? Do you enjoy torturing yourself?!"
His words brought back the old dark imagery. That scary bedroom. His lustful predator eyes rolled up. The sharp pain of those bruises that had turned from purple to yellow to green as they healed.
My body started to shake.
"Listen,” he replied, this time much softer. “I love to live abroad as much as you do. But it's just impossible! They won't let us. You know that!"
"I'll handle it. I'll find a way to get somewhere better," I said.
My friends who knew what was happening to me in Poland opposed me going back. Some with anger, some with tears.
"But that’s unnecessary!” said Sina. “Now that you’re rich, maybe your father will support you and you won't have to go back to that monster!"
I tried to talk my father into giving me some money so I could support myself in Europe. But he was still vehemently opposed to me going abroad. I soon stopped trying to push him. I didn’t want him to know why I needed his money. I couldn't risk him figuring out what was happening to me in Europe. Because if he did, he would’ve stopped me from leaving.
I just left. I said a final goodbye to my friends and my brother, and took a bus to Tehran for my flight.
There, I met my Tehrani friends. It was the last time our friend group, “Brooklyn Babies,” was to be in one place. It was a solemn meeting in a coffee shop, like a funeral for the living. Everyone had brought something as the last token of our friendship. Rana brought out a letter, Sara gave me a book, and Sina took a CD out of his bag. "It's a little CD I made for you," said Sina. It was a collection of love songs. "Listen to this. Pretend he’s somebody else. Pretend you love him. That will make it easier for you." He put his head on the table, covered it with his hands, and sobbed quietly.
I boarded the plane and returned to Europe, this time with a sense of facing a huge battle.
That last trip to Iran changed me. I made that risky choice to go back to Europe under those conditions. I made that choice not because I wanted to get away from pain, but because the content of that box reminded me of what I most care about.
That day when I stepped on the plane, I had a clear vision of what I can and can’t change. I couldn’t change the terrifying fact that, with immigration laws as mind-bendingly unjust as they are, the only legal path out of Iran for an 18-year-old boy like me went through the bedroom of that stupefyingly evil creature.
It was maddeningly sad that I had to do this. But it was a fact beyond my control that the world was such that I needed to run on fire to reach freedom. And I stepped on fire with grace and intention.
Yes, I couldn't always remain true to who I was that day. Many times throughout the remaining five years of my journey, I got maddeningly sad and angry at the world for being the way it is. At times I doubted whether living in the West was worth the pain. And in some periods of uncertainty, lost in darkness, I completely forgot why I was doing this.
But now that I'm living in the United States, now that I wake up energetic and in love with my life, excited to open my laptop to write this Substack for incredible people like you, I can say with absolute certainty that it was all worth it. It shouldn’t have been so hard, but every bruise, every tear, every moment of terror—it was all worth it for this life.
This isn't a story of “resilience.”
It’s a story of grief with a spine.
I hear you saying:
I am more than where I was born.
I am not yours to bury.
This is not a happy ending.
This is a beginning forged in blood.
Honor it. Don’t romanticize it.
And don’t look away.