The Old Photo Album

My taxi driver today had bright blue eyes, the kind that startle you. He drove me all the way to the studio when I realized I did not take my keys with me, so he drove me back and waited until I went up and fetched the keys. When I came back he was wiping his white Hyundai and smoking a cigarette. I could tell he loves his car, so I was extra careful to close the door very gently. I’ve made the mistake of shutting the door too hard once and had to experience the wrath of a man whose car did not get the royal treatment that she deserved. He went as far as yelling at me. I was terrified and made sure to be extra gentle since then.

What a peculiar feeling to be a foreigner in a place that was once dear and familiar. What a victory of time to show you that nature will take its toll and you’ll end up getting used to other streets, highways, zipcodes and time zones. Only bits and pieces will be spared, like the tiny feeling somewhere around my throat when I pass by the high school I attended, or the tingle in my stomach when I see the rain drizzle on the windshield of a car taking me somewhere as evening falls and the city lights up in a festive way.

In the past two decades, anytime I spoke with freshly arrived immigrants from Azerbaijan, they often spoke of Baku as an enclosed place, a place without escape, a place that constrains you, encircles you into a reality, thus canceling the possibility of any other life. I did not understand them back then and I am nowhere close to grasping that unspoken sentiment now, but I begin to see things as one sees silhouettes when the sun begins to rise. After living in America’s largest cities, I realize how small Baku really is, like a social experiment.

Yesterday I was walking home and getting myself ready to cross another street without a panic attack when I heard my name several times. It came right from the heart of a bottleneck traffic adjacent to the Seaside Boulevard. What was the point of calling my name if you were driving away anyways? And who was this? It turned out to be Ilyas. Last time I had a meaningful conversation with Ilyas was in 11th grade. I asked him why was he so fascinated with dinosaurs. He said he didn’t know. Ilyas jumped out of the passenger seat of his Tesla (they had them here too?) and ran towards me. He then walked me home and tried to catch me up on his life, so I ended up with random and bizarre fragments. He often traveled to Dubai. He wanted to get into film business, but was currently working on a tree recycling project that he initiated even though he did not believe in climate change or eco activism. He suggested we visit Iran together. At this very point we reached my building and he gave me a big hug. I left thinking that there is simply no mental way of reconciling who we were in high school and he we ended up being in adult life. In my mind, I was expecting to see him still obsessing over dinosaurs.

That evening I thought of the fact that this city felt like a tribute to your life. Here was the hospital where you were delivered into this busy world and then driven to your parents apartment where two sets of grandmas, aunts, neighbors and others that considered themselves family swaddled you, fed you, rocked you and took silly pictures of you. And so it went – daycares, clinics that you visited because your address was “zoned” to them, all the schools that you’ve ever visited always stood there, unchanged, unmoved. You always crossed the parks where you once walked hand in hand with the person you thought was “the one. The city was marked with these experiences. Here was the Seaside park where you sat across the water and cried when someone broke your heart. Here was the tree that you’ve passed by since you were a child.

Seasons changed, schools, friends, weddings, divorces.. the hair on your head might have gone gray, but the tree bloomed ever the same, every spring. It occurred to me that your attitude towards this microcosm could go either way depending on what has happened in your life. Baku was an album of polaroid pictures. Life provided the content and you snapped the pictures. We tend to think of photo albums as a place that has nothing but smiles and happy moments, but this album did not spare you the sight of tears, failures or disappointments. They stood like monuments to famous writers, poets and composers of the city’s renaissance and you were forced to shake hands with them at every encounter. The memories of days gone by. No life was flowers and butterflies all the time. We all had periods of pain and loss, but in other countries you could get on a train or airplane and bid them good-bye. In other countries, but not here. Here, you learned how to co-exist with your memories under the same, cloudy sky. You learned how to live with it, unless… unless you didn’t.