• The absurd/grotesque quality works for me.
  Moving between formal and administrative language, humorous and poetic moments.

• The fact that the text can make the audience laugh and then, perhaps immediately, embarrass them for laughing works for me.

• The ambiguity and fluidity of the role the audience adopts works for me (translator, lover, officer, …).

• Making the audience uncomfortable works for me (not offending them, though). The situation is inherently uncomfortable—you explain your most private stories to a government official.

• The fact that after this performance (and for a long time afterward in social settings) nobody talks to me about Iran—or if they do, they are very careful not to say something stupid—works for me.

• The initial statement actually enabled people to reflect on aesthetics and the performativity of what they saw in the Q&A session (rather than merely content).

• Depriving myself of the audience works for me. Taking on a mask for self-protection.

• After this performance, I think a lot about bodilessness, about the hidden Libers in the studio, about the few kilos of paper that are with me. I wonder so much about what my performance could be about. I only know that I don’t want pity. You haven’t come here to hear the tale of another miserable immigrant. I don’t even honestly know how much it should be about immigration. It could be about love. About how “I too have had a life”—

• I think about the “witness.”

• How can an innocent reading of a text become dangerous? How can reading words hold you accountable for something?

• The foolish visuals and stock photos work for me—a clean, assembled life that reflects diversity and all the values that Sweden loves.

• I’m not happy with my performer.

• Chair play works for me. The chairs behind this chair.

• The main thing that doesn’t work for me is that my anger and narrative in this version are misleading. Part of my anger here is directed at the bureaucratic process in Iran. This approach ends up funneling a flood of stupid comments my way after the performance and, even worse, puts the Western audience in a very safe position.

• Having papers on stage and referring to their weight could be interesting—but I’m not sure about bringing documents on stage.
  I think this text should push further into alternative narratives. What if this couple had ten more extreme stories? I need a bit of fiction. (Also, fiction helps dodge legal hassles.)

• I like to frame the performance as a “bad performance.” بهلول.

• I get it—I’m tired of being questioned.

• After this showing, I feel like I want this performance to be a sort of refuge in a black box. I want to set up the interaction so that the performance becomes a space for holding a stranger's hand, for socializing—perhaps because, ever since I arrived here, socializing and being heard have just disappeared from my life.

Someone asks me, “Didn't you want your performance to be like an assembly? Didn’t you say the missing part of your life is your social life?”

I say, “Yes—I still want to socialize, but not with these people. I’m destined to see these people as a nightmare for years. Sweden is caught up in a collective autism.”

Then she asks, “What is it that you truly desire in life? How can the stage respond to that?”

I reply, “My desire is to have a superpower that lets me leave Sweden for two minutes. And this involves no fucking audience. It might not even be theater at all—it could be a superhero film meant only for my eyes. We even think that perhaps, in this performance, the audience is meant to be ghosted (in the Urban Dictionary sense).”

I know I’m into gamifying the performance.

I have no preference about being on stage or not. I’m not an actor, but I can perform myself—I can be a host. I’d prefer to shape it in a way that works even outside Sweden. Though I have no intention of making this performance a platform for social justice, and I don’t want it to be seen as activism, I believe this is the story of many: the uncertainty of the future and the daydreams that grow stranger every day as life is spent waiting.