Everything Sad Is Untrue (a true story)

by Daniel Nayeri

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Or imagine you just watch all of this. And you act like you’re disgusted, because you don’t like meanness. But you don’t do anything or tell anyone.

Imagine how much you’ve got compared to all the kids in the world getting blown up or starved, and the good you could do if you spent half a second thinking about it.

Suddenly evil isn’t punching people or ev...

Suddenly it’s all that stuff you’ve...

All the kindness you could ...

All the excuses you gav...

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.

the version where she grows and takes her father’s house back—that’s not how the story goes.

We lived in an apartment before Ray. Brentwood Apartments. It was a nice place. I once saw a kid explode his tongue with a car battery, so I guess it was the kind of place where they value education.

Iran is not the same country as Iraq.

It is a complicated thing that a little kid, or even a fifth grader, can’t understand, that we are always choosing situations that hurt us.

We choose them so deeply that we don’t know we chose them. We think we had to. We think the world did it to us.

And then we think, what a horrible world that makes a weapon out of love. That stabs you with it, even when you can’t defend yourself and the other p...

It’s a miracle that anyone would ever fall in love with someone else and—of all the people in the worl...

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 only have the memories of people quitting love. So I’ve seen it. 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). They tell themselves it’s okay to give up, because love should be like the shows on TV, where you float uncontrollably on the smell of the other’s perfume. They lie to themselves with stories of Aziz and Hassan, whose love—they say—was like Khosrou and Shirin, a legendary love, a love so big that if it was a mountain it would sink the earth to the bottom of the well of the universe. HERE IS AN INTERESTING question that I heard once in church. Can God create a mountain so big that He himself couldn’t lift it?

It’s trying to put God in a corner, because if He can or if He can’t, He’s not all-powerful.

the question is silly, because it assumes God is as stupid as we are. If you’re as big as God, there’s no such thing as “lifting.” It’s all just floating in a million universes you made. If you made an object ...

And God is as big as everything at once....

The better question is, Can God create a law so big that He himself has to obey it? Is there an idea so big that God doesn’t remember anything before it? That answer is love. Love is the object of unusual size.

AT FOURTEEN, AZIZ WAS a beauty. But this would be difficult for anyone to know because girls at that time stayed home. So a boy didn’t know who to call on (which meant going to their house and asking the parents if he could court their daughter (which meant sitting in a parlor with her and talking to see if he wanted to get married)). So moms came up with strategies. At the public baths, they would look for the beautiful girls and tell their sons to go calling at their houses. Or people would look at the brothers. If the brothers had soft flowy hair and nice cheeks and pretty eyes, people would assume his sister would too, so she’d get a bunch of callers. But if the brother was a hairy boar, like if he spit a lot and had a giant nose, people would imagine it on a girl’s face and that sister would have lots of time to read.

Persian love stories are all tragedies. To explain love, I have to tell you three stories:

The first is the myth of Khosrou and Shirin. The second is the legend of Aziz and her husbands. The third is the history of how I broke my thumb at my mom’s church.

This is how Persians host. There are very important rules to treating guests with honor. The farmer would just keep apologizing. They would go back and forth. Until the farmer wiped the rug clean.

This is called “tarof,” by the way, this politeness that goes on forever.

when a Persian tarofs you, there are rules. I can’t tell you them now cause I’m in the middle of a story, but you should know those rules because they’re just trying to give you respect. Otherwise you end up making everyone feel like garbage. Like, you already know the American rule that when you walk into someone’s house, you don’t go, “Nice couch,” and then climb all over the couch with your shoes on. It’s that kind of thing.

In Oklahoma, when people from church come to our apartment, they don’t ask if they should take their shoes off. They just walk on the rug. But then our rug isn’t very nice, so maybe they aren’t embarrassed when they get mud all over it. It’s the most expensive thing we have, because our TV is a hand-me-down. But it’s still not that nice. My mom doesn’t say anything because they never start the tarof and they never realize when she’s doing it.

This was when the Persian Empire was so big that uncles and princes each got their own countries to play with. The saddest moment, I think, is that when his brothers grabbed the king in his palace, they blinded him first. I imagine one version of the story where the king falls to his knees before his ungrateful guests and looks at his father’s great gold springtime carpet, maybe focuses on a single poppy flower made of rubies stitched around yellow diamonds with one black pearl at the center—and he watches as the boots of traitor soldiers tread it with the blood of his loyal servants. And that’s the last thing he sees before the hand of eternal darkness covers his eyes—a poppy, red like blood.

No one ever told me if Khosrou II was part of the plan to kill his own father. I never imagined the king looking up to see his son standing in the poppy field. They probably didn’t tell me because I’m named after him and it would be a curse to be named after a treacherous son.

The lesson here is that you can fall in love with a story you have in your head.

And the same happened to Shirin, who fell in love with Khosrou just by looking at a picture of him. You can imagine people a certain way and it’s like you created them.

Like a whole new Kelly who doesn’t roll her eyes so much.

The lesson here is that people have scales in their heads and they measure other people for their value and ugly refugee boys are near the bottom and pretty blond girls are at the top. This is not a happy lesson. But you either get the truth, or you get good news—you don’t often get both.

The lesson here is don’t ask anybody for anything you can’t pay for.

Or maybe it’s that nobody cares if two lovers get together—that’s like a cake only they get to eat. But nobody likes to watch someone else eat cake.

I don’t know the lesson exactly at this point. Honestly, Mrs. Miller, not e...

The lesson here is that if you watch the side characters in a love story, you might notice the lovers treating them like garbage, with the excuse that they’re doing it for love.

But another lesson might be that maybe you’re not the hero of every story, and maybe Farhad was Shirin’s true love, or maybe there isn’t just one person designated for everybody. Maybe there’s a lot more to it—maybe you choose and you practice, and that’s what makes the love true.

Farhad had chosen to love Shirin and threw himself into the task of sculpting the face of the world. He carved the stone of Behistun into a staircase—one step at a time—all the while dreaming that he’d reach the peak of the mountain and by then he’d have changed the world. He could fl...

When Khosrou heard that Farhad was making progress—that day and night he worked at carving the rock and loving Shirin—Khosrou was filled with jealousy.

He could see—if he squinted, and if his eyes weren’t full of tears—all the way to Armenia. And he thought of all the pain he had eaten to see Shirin again. Her face. He screamed words in the unknowable language. And he jumped. And he did not fly.

THE LESSON HERE IS that your happiest memories can become your saddest all of a sudden.

KHOSROU WAS SO STUPID in this story that he thought he could have Shirin, now that Farhad was dead.

His heart had festered with murder and jealousy—so little by little he boiled away all the loving parts.

But in this story, there is also real poison.

people get married for all kinds of reasons, so she still wanted him.

One thing that is interesting is that lots of poisons taste sweet. They’re not like acid. They’re like syrup. This is interesting because you can imagine Maryam taking a drink of mulberry cordial one night and saying, “Mmm, shirin,” which is the word for “sweet,” and also the word for her killer.

Maryam died clawing at her own throat, trying to scrape or squeeze the shirin poison back out as it ripped her apart. B...

And the lesson here is that people are unlikeable. They have the irritating habit of believing they are as important as you are to the story. I might be especially unlikeable to you because I’m not beautiful like Scheher...