Everybody's life starts in the past and goes on to stop somewhere in future. We cannot escape the inevitability of change but we are also defined by the gravitational pull of memory. My identity was shaped in the antiquity of Persian culture, reconfigured in the 20th century as Iranian. The agency of the past is stronger for migrants and those who live far away from their homeland. Division and dislocation can be felt both at home and abroad, represented as a gap between two pieces of paper; a rupture between the experience of the past and hope for the future.