You wake up at Sea Island Park in Vancouver. You wake up at Granville Island. You wake up at English Bay watching cruise ships glide toward Alaska. Then you wake up at 3:17 AM and remember you're not in Tehran anymore.

This is called displacement. This is called existing in the wrong time zone. This is what happens when your body occupies one continent while your mind refuses to leave another.

The body remembers what the mind tries to forget.

Four years is 1,461 days is 35,064 hours of being a ghost stretched between continents. Do the math yourself. Calculate the weight of absence. I never talk about homesickness. It's too obvious to mention. Like water to a fish, oxygen to lungs. Like the constant awareness that your life is happening in the wrong language.

In Vancouver, rain falls in a constant whisper that sounds nothing like Tehran's thunderstorms. Here, water apologizes as it drips from Douglas firs. Back home, it arrived with authority, beating dust from the northern mountains. Alborz stood guard over the city like a parent. The North Shore mountains are beautiful but they're not yours. They never will be.

People smile at you in grocery stores. Their teeth bright and meaningless. "How are you today?" they ask, not waiting for your answer. A rule of Canadian interaction: never expect the question to be genuine. In Tehran, a simple greeting could bloom into three hours over tea, family histories exchanged like currency. Here, Starbucks serves connection in disposable cups, lukewarm and overpriced.

Your mouth forms words your throat doesn't recognize.

You keep two clocks on your phone. Vancouver and Tehran. For four years, you've been living in the hyphen between time zones. Someone invented the term "Third Culture Kid" for this condition. That's what happens when committees name diseases. Bureaucrats labeling pain they've never felt.

Some pretend homesickness is temporary. A phase. Something that passes like kidney stones – painful but eventually gone. Nobody tells you it metabolizes, becomes part of your cellular structure. Your DNA now carries nostalgia as a dominant trait. Your children will inherit the phantom limb of a country they've never visited.

Did you know that Rumi – yes, the one white Lululemon yoga instructors quote on Instagram – was displaced from Balkh to Konya. Seven hundred years before you stood at YVR with two suitcases, wondering which pieces of yourself to declare at customs. What's the duty on emotional baggage? On memories? On the weight of belonging?

The tongue forgets its native shape after enough foreign syllables.

The Persian language has 16 words for the concept of yearning. English has "homesick" and "nostalgic" – blunt instruments to perform emotional surgery. Try removing your heart with a spoon instead of a scalpel. That's what translation feels like.

In your Vancouver apartment, you've recreated Tehran in miniature. A Saffron tin from Tajrish Bazaar. A kilim rug too small for the living room. A playlist of songs that sound like your childhood. You stream IRIB on your laptop while rain reconstructs the coastline outside your window. Digital saffron scenting artificial spaces. Homesickness as interior decoration.

This isn't unique. Nothing about your pain is special. In apartments across Vancouver – across Toronto, London, Los Angeles, Stockholm – five million Iranian expatriates are doing exactly the same thing right now. A diaspora of identical shrines to elsewhere. Millions of people watching the same sunset eight and a half hours too late.

Scientists say the human brain processes grief and homesickness in the same neural pathways. On your four-year anniversary of arrival, an MRI would show Vancouver superimposed on Tehran like a double-exposed photograph. Two homes occupying the same skull. Neither one fully in focus. Your brain is a palimpsest of places. Cities writing over cities.

Your accent is the sound of cultures colliding.

Eventually you forget what's authentic. Was your mother's Ghormeh Sabzi really that shade of green? Did the call to prayer actually echo that way through Ekbatan? Memory becomes a Wikipedia page anyone can edit. You question your own sensory record. This is how identity dissolves – not all at once, but in tiny increments of doubt.

Four years gone. 1,461 days of building a life between parentheses. Every immigrant carries an invisible passport stamped with all the versions of themselves they might have been. The jobs never taken. The marriages never entered. The children never born in the country left behind. You're haunted by your own parallel lives.

On a long enough timeline, everyone becomes a foreigner to their former selves.

You wake up at Kitsilano Beach. You wake up at Gastown. You wake up at SkyTrain stations with announcements in English. You wake up next to someone who's never seen Tehran, who can't pronounce the street where you grew up.

Then you wake up at 3:17 AM and realize: home is no longer a place on Google Maps. It's the distance between where you started and who you've become. It's the space you occupy that nobody else can see.

Everywhere and nowhere at once.

You wake up. You're still here. You're still there. You're the hyphen. The bridge. The ghost.

This is what survival looks like.

Essays

Days of Nowhere

The First Rule of AI Club

Digital Currents: The Surrender