There is no sensation of velocity in the airplane’s drowsy and darkened cabin, no motion to attract a bored eye.  Lolling heads stretch to the business class section and the aisle is deserted.  Next to me the window is an oval cutout of starry sky.  I press my forehead against the cool plexiglass and stare down from my perch in the night.  Lost in the ghostly murk below is Kansas City, receding.  Somewhere ahead of me is San Diego.  I don’t know where I am right now.  Over the Rocky Mountains, maybe.

I sit in the beveled glow of a reading light.  A photo album of faces and places is splayed across my lap.  I turn the glossy pages with an unpainted fingernail, reliving the moments that were worth capturing.  It doesn’t take long to reach the last photograph.  The brief transit across my adult life makes me a little sad.  I’m 22 now, almost 23.  I wish it took more pages to hold the experiences I haven’t had, all my sights unseen.

Saman is the star of the album.  I look like an afterthought even when I’m the only one in the photo.  Across the pages he seems to thicken and settle, becoming a fixture in ever-changing apartments.  His bulk inhabits a bland wardrobe of dress shirts and slacks.  Rings multiply on his fingers.  Sometimes he’s nut-brown in the wake of a business trip that was more play than work.  He smiles brightest when surrounded by his relatives, and more dimly when it’s just the two of us.

Of all the pictures in the album, the last one is the most symbolic.  We’re captured in brief proximity at Norouz, the Persian New Year that’s springtime back in Iran but still winter in most of America.  He stands beside me with enough space showing through to satisfy the moral police.  He looks halfway between the camera and me, avoiding both.  His smile is vague and uncomfortable, the way it gets when I ask him if I can call my sister, if I can go on the computer, if I can leave the apartment unescorted.  Behind him is a glimpse of the household where he rules as king, and the front door to his other life as an accountant in the family business.

I stare at the picture with a thumb over my two-dimensional face, just contemplating him.  I already know what I look like.  A wife with doubts seeping into her heartbeats.  A daughter-in-law trying too hard.  A girl afraid of whatever happens next.

I married Saman knowing – knowing – that I was choosing this life.  A traditional Iranian man has certain expectations.  So does his family.  So does mine, for that matter.  But I never expected this life to be so hard.  Inhabiting a world where I’m always second-best – to my husband, to his parents, to every relative-in-law.  Depending on him for money, since it would be shameful if I had my own income.  Moving from one lookalike apartment and unwelcoming city to the next.  Hosting near-strangers from Iran for months on end.  Resisting all the pressure to hurry up and give him children.

Sometimes I wish I’d waited to marry.  No, be honest with yourself, Nooshin – I wish that all the time.  If I could meet the bride in the black-and-white portraits inside the album’s front cover, I’d tell her to wait.  Scream it at her, even.  Go to college first!  Date boys like any American girl would!  Make sure he loves you!

But I already know it would be useless.  I remember what it was like to be that bride.  She was 18 years naïve, and scared of life on her own, and worried that she couldn’t do any better.

Let’s face it, I’m not a catch in any culture.  My body is shaped like a kebab – tall, flat-chested, with narrow boy hips and not much butt.  Worse, I have a lazy eye.  My right one.  I received treatment for it after we immigrated to America, so I’m not a total freakshow, but still.  People prefer it when you look at them, not at them and everything off to their left simultaneously.

That’s why my family began shopping me around like spoiling fruit during my senior year of high school.  It was their responsibility to find me a husband, after all.  Dating is forbidden in Islam.  My aunts were characteristically blunt about their matchmaking.  A girl like me had to be realistic.  I was no princess, and I couldn’t expect to find a prince.  I should take the first man who came my way, because there might not be another.

My hopes were pinned to the few Persian boys in our neighborhood in East Los Angeles, a future generation of waiters and taxi drivers from humble families like mine.  But their names never came up.  In fact no names came up.  My aunts pretended that everything was okay, but Mom couldn’t.  I knew why empty wine bottles kept appearing in the garbage.  No families wanted a union with ours.  It was a rejection of us even more than it was a rejection of me.

A couple months before graduation I was introduced to Mrs. Fazel, a professional matchmaker who specialized in marriages to Iranians.  It was time to face the facts.  I only had one thing going for me – my citizenship.  She showed me a picture of Saman.  He wanted to come to America.  His family was honorable and starting businesses in this country, mostly in the Midwest.  Did I want to marry him?  I studied his face carefully.  My husband, I thought.

Five years ago I said yes.  Now I don’t know the answer.

But I know the list of compulsions keeping me with Saman.  I can recite them by heart.  A domestic loyalty enforced by my lack of beauty and options.  All the insecurities I offset because of this diamond ring on my finger.  My family’s relief in marrying me off, and their anger if they had to do it again.  A college degree I don’t have and probably never will.  And most of all, the stupid way I surrender to everything.

Every morning I linger half-awake, hoping this is just a bad dream.  I’ll open my eyes and a different man will be snoring beside me, a different girl in the mirror will be rubbing the sleepdust out of her eyes.  Or maybe I’ll be back in my high school bedroom with the chance to do it all over again.  But today never turns out to be a bad dream.  Just more of the same.

I struggle to envision the rest of my life with Saman, and struggle even more to envision my life without him.  I hide behind a silent calm and pretend I feel no pain.  I go through the requisite motions – in the kitchen, with his family, whenever he wants sex.  I watch another year drag off the calendar.

No bad marriage should last forever.  I keep telling myself that, and even the Quran agrees.  But my shame is thick, and I feel so despondently lethargic, and the truth is written in the face of every person I meet – I’m no princess, and I can’t expect to find a prince.  Maybe this is as good as it gets for a girl like me.  Welcome to your future, Nooshin.  Year after year after year, until the morning my eyes finally don’t open.