I was eleven years old when my mother told me we were going on vacation.
We never came back.
I didn’t know. Nobody told me. The suitcases looked like vacation suitcases. The plane felt like a vacation plane. And then, slowly, the days kept stretching, and the word “vacation” stopped fitting.
We had left Iran. We had applied for asylum. We were never going home.
I remember sitting on the couch in our living room before we left — the last days, although I didn’t know they were the last. My mother was in the kitchen, her hands under the running water, washing dishes. Her shoulders were tense. She knew. I didn’t.
But something in me knew. I felt it without being able to name it. A weight in my chest. A pressure behind my ribs. The kind of knowing a child has before words exist for it.
Years later, in a therapy session, I went back to that moment. I closed my eyes. I sat on that couch again. I felt the sun cutting too brightly through the windows, as if the light itself was trying to hide something.
And my therapist did something strange. He walked into the memory. He sat down with my mother. He told her: He already knows. Tell him.
She didn’t want to. He was too young, she said. He couldn’t handle it.
But the truth is — he was already handling it. He was already carrying it. He just wasn’t being allowed to name it.
When she finally said the words — we’re emigrating — the boy on the couch broke. His body shook. His breath caught. The tears came in waves he couldn’t stop.
And then I stepped in. The adult me. I knelt beside the boy I used to be. I pulled him into me. He was small. Warm. His tear-streaked face pressed against my chest.
And I told him the truth.
It’s not a vacation. It’s going to be hard. You’ll move from asylum center to asylum center. You’ll make friends and lose them. You’ll lose your country, your grandmother’s garden, your cousins, the smell of home. And it will hurt every single time.
But I’ll be here. I am here now. And I will always be here.
He stopped sobbing. Slowly. His grip on my shirt loosened.
For the first time, he felt seen.
And something inside me — thirty years later — finally shifted.
This is what I mean when I talk about the inner child.
There is a boy inside me who sat on that couch. Who felt something heavy in his chest and was told nothing. Who got on a plane he didn’t understand. Who said goodbye to a life he didn’t know he was leaving.
For thirty years, that boy was waiting.
Not to be fixed. Not to be saved.
Just to be told the truth.
And to be held.