An old and dear friend sent me today this photograph that he had taken of me twenty-two years ago. The image has come back to life from a collection of negatives that had waited in a box for more than twenty years to be developed, and finally, in another corner of the world, this return to colour became possible. That is why this photograph is both new and old.

The photograph was taken on 25 Khordad 1380 in Mahmoudabad, when I was twenty-four... a time when cameras and telephones were not the same thing. How much has happened to me and to us since then. Everything that later arrived from the future was, that day, hidden somewhere in time. I feel that perhaps somewhere, still behind the hills of time, I am standing there on that same beach. Who knows what time is? Whatever it is, it is not linear.

If I could return to those days, would I change anything? Perhaps. But the change would be more like correcting mistakes in a poem after writing it—perhaps changing the choice of certain words, while still writing the same poem.

The poem would be the same, but I am sure I would turn it more fully into a song: more loving, more passionate, more alive, more dangerous, more musical. Yet I would write the same poem, so that in every verse I would meet the same beautiful people who entered my life. I am certain I would not want or write another poem. But with the same poem I would sing and dance more. I would experience not different words, but more fully the tone in which the song of life is composed and the dancing that accompanies it.

It is a strange feeling to meet again a fragment of past time that we did not know could be recovered. I remembered how much I loved that tactical denim journalist’s vest. :)