Everything Sad Is Untrue (a true story)

by Daniel Nayeri

That’s what forgetting your grandpa’s face feels like. There’s no good in it. Nothing to gain but nothing. A piece of your heart makes a sound like a groan and disappears. Then you poke at it sometimes, trying to remember what was there by the shape of the hole. That’s it. You are less.

To lose something you never had can be just as painful—because it is the hope of having it that you lose.

Suddenly evil isn’t punching people or even hating them. Suddenly it’s all that stuff you’ve left undone. All the kindness you could have given. All the excuses you gave instead. Imagine that for a minute. Imagine what it means.

WELL, ANYWAY, DON’T GET too upset. You can always find somebody worse-acting than you and say, at least I’m not as bad as that guy. And you can feel good and go to the mall and go back to being evil.

want to stay in love with her until she realizes I am a person.

Which means we end up with someone and there’s lots of choosing to do. Choosing to forgive strange smells or choosing that Gadzooks is not the only place that boyfriends can shop.

I’ve seen love take hard work that they don’t want to do anymore. They just decide their own kids aren’t worth it (my dad).

People are like that. They’re immune to the sadness of others.

“It’ll be alright in the end, folks. If it’s not alright, then it’s not the end,”

think a person gets seen, really looked at, looked into, seen the way a leopard would see into you, maybe ten times in their entire life.

Every side of an explosion looks different. If you’re looking at a bull collapsing to the ground and I’m beside you looking at it, we’re seeing two bulls die, two rivers of blood, two everything. That’s why there is an infinite labyrinth of stories, even in just one family.

Making anything assumes there’s a world worth making it for. That you’ll have someplace, like a clown’s pants, to hide it when people come to take it away.

guess I’m saying making something is a hopeful thing to do. And being hopeful in a world of pain is either brave or crazy.

It’s just whoever manages not to hurt you all the time. You think they must be the best the world has to offer. The little window of time you aren’t in pain can seem like happiness.

you’re a kid who’s counting the memories of your grandpa’s hands, and your dad’s laugh, and a whole country full of different flower smells, and birds you woke up to, and your grandma’s craggy face—geez, you could barely even picture it—and all the words to a language people think you made up, then all the days you spent getting beat up in Oklahoma aren’t even worth collecting.

He hated her. Even in his brand-new kid heart, he’d found the hate spot.

“It will be okay,”

Ellie was the happiest I have ever seen her. Maybe

So all of a sudden my mom had a six-year-old saying she was a Christian, which—if you didn’t know—was a crime in Iran. Not a regular one either, a capital crime. The kind where if you’re found guilty, they kill you.

Which is why we can see the same things but come to different conclusions about how to heal all our broken hearts.

Which we all have. Which is such a big part of our lives that we don’t even notice the pain of it.

We’re completely numb to it, because it’s constant. It’s so true it’s boring. Which is really our brains, terrified, hoping to ignore the fact...

That’s why everyone is distracted with TV shows and no one likes to talk about it. Our broken hearts problem. But we’re going to have to talk about it soon, so gird your loins, reader. For now, here’s a poop story to make ...

It’s the most important thing about you, whose you are. It’s more important than your race or religion. It’s more important than what shows you like. It’s the part of you that talks to itself so late at night that you’re not even sure you’re awake. It’s the concentrated you, collected in a pool of genetic fluids, creative juice, carbonic goo, passions, past mistakes, memories of other people, opinions about sweets, the intense desire to visit Italy, habits, the smell of your fart—all together in a thick maple syrup of your human situation. Your blood. That’s you. The truest thing about you.

In Oklahoma, rich people have nice things. In Iran, they have nice spaces.

How can you explain why you believe anything? So I just say what my mom says when people ask her. She looks them in the eye with the begging hope that they’ll hear her and she says, “Because it’s true.”

It’s true and it’s more valuable than seven million dollars in gold coins, and thousands of acres of Persian countryside, and ten years of education to get a medical degree, and all your family, and a home, and the best cream puffs of Jolfa, and even maybe your life.

you believe it’s true, that there is a God and He wants you to believe in Him and He sent His Son to die for you—then it has to take over your life. It has to be worth more than everything else, because heaven’s waiting on the other side.

We can keep talking about it, keep grinding our teeth on why Sima converted, since it turned the fate of everybody in the story. It’s why we’re here hiding in Oklahoma. We can wonder and question and disagree. You can be certain she’s dead wrong. But you can’t make Sima agree with you. It’s true. Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again. This whole story hinges on it. Sima—who was such a fierce Muslim

And how do you know anything for certain anyway? Maybe don’t be so certain all the time.

We hated waiting for grownies to talk about eternity. It seemed so obvious that everything was already eternal. That something made all of it. Something that loved and was beautiful and was cosmically and royally ticked off with what everyone was up to.

changed your life. Another way to say it is that everybody is dying and going to die of something. And if you’re not spending your life on the stuff you believe, then what are you even doing? What is the point of the whole thing?

won’t ever notice. Men who make Committees and go around stealing mothers and hurting them, they’re just red ants killing black ants in a giant universe that has tornadoes bigger than the biggest thing we have ever built. And that’s a nice thought. It’s nice to be unimportant.

And the legend is true. I think because she’s fixed her eyes on something beyond the rivers of blood, to a beautiful place on the other side.

OH, AND IN CASE IT wasn’t obvious, the answer is both. God should be both. If a god isn’t, that is no God.

kitten. I think because in polite American society, they care more if you seem happy than if you’re well.

Maybe half-good is as good as it gets in this life. And maybe that’s why my mom was so interested in the next one.

The point of the Nights is that if you spend time with each other—if we really listen in the parlors of our minds and look at each other as we were meant to be seen—then we would fall in love. We would marvel at how beautifully we were made. We would never think to be villain kings, and we would never kill each other. Just the opposite. The stories aren’t the thing. The thing is the story of the story. The spending of the time. The falling in love.

All the good stuff is in between and around the things that happen. It’s what you imagine I might be like when I’m not

Reading is the act of listening and speaking at the same time, with someone you’ve never met, but love. Even if you hate them, it’s a loving thing to do.

Why we weren’t interesting enough or fun enough to hold close. I’m not a baby anymore. I know a stuffed sheep is just a toy. But I loved that thing so much I would have done anything to be with Mr. Sheep Sheep again.

I ever have a kid, I wouldn’t let them go, ever. Even if they had to leave Earth, and I had to follow them into airless space, I’d

My mom is the hero of this whole story, in case you were wondering. She always did what heroes do. The law that applied to her was the law of sacrificial love. The legend was unstoppable belief. The myth was the strongest person you have ever known. Not Hercules. Not Rostam. Not Jean Claude van Damme could protect and love as Sima, my mom, who was our champion, and who—like Jesus—took all the damage so we wouldn’t have to.

I MAGINE YOU’RE IN A refugee camp and you know it’ll be a year or more before anything happens. It’s going to be a tough year. But for the person who thinks, “At the end of this year, I’m going somewhere to be free, a place without secret police, free to believe whatever I want and teach my children.” And you believe it’ll be hard, but eventually, you’ll build a whole new life—that’s like winning the lottery. It’s like saying you’ll get one hundred million dollars at the end of the year. But if you’re thinking every place is the same, and there will always be people who abuse you, and about how poor you’ll be at first. The sadness overtakes you; it’s like saying you’ll get a soup and a sandwich at the end of the year, and that’s it. Here’s the thing, you’ll both have the same year at Hotel Barba. But one of you will be looking around with joy and anticipation, wondering what you can do to prepare your kids for the new world. And the other will be slumped in the courtyard, surrendered to the idea that it’s all one long river of blood. I don’t know which belief is true—nobody does. But what you believe about the future will change how you live in the present. That’s how she did it.