Modern love the pod cast supported by produced by the island at W B. You are faster, from the New York Times and WB. You are Boston, this is modern love stories of love, loss and redemption. I'm your host magnet The. What goes story makes headlines and for a while you hear about it constantly, but then gradually the spotlight.

aids and those names and faces that were once everywhere suddenly they're gone. He rarely get to hear the rest of their story. The story behind the story, but Josh Football shared his with modern love, here's Joshua Jackson, best known for rules and show times the affair, and the nineties hit Dawson's Creek reading Josh's peace reaching out between the bars Jenny showed up to my welcome Home Party in Philadelphia, hundreds attended, but my eyes kept finding their way back to hers. It had been three years since we ve seen each other, the last two of which I spent imprisoned, partly in solitary confinement and Evin prison and terror on IRAN.

On that, fateful day, more than twenty six months earlier, I had been detained with my friend Chain Bauer and Sarah shored after we unknowingly hiked over an unmarked border of iraqi Kurdistan into a rainy in Kurdistan. We world college friends vacationing in that relatively safe region between work assignments abroad and the locals had told us about a beautiful waterfall in the mountains that would make for a suitable day hike. Our mistake was continuing passed away. In the fall to the ridgeline for the view where an armed iranian border guards spotted us and motioned us down to him the first he took his. Was border outpost and then we were loaded into a car and whisked away the iranian authorities ultimately charged us with espionage

which was farcical. Given we had little money, no language skills and no means to sustain ourselves beyond the day hike we knew we had become political prisoners. Are detention referred in the fraud history between the United States and IRAN, a relationship that soured holy since the CIA Back coup in nineteen fifty three and its support of the country's authoritarian king until one thousand nine hundred and seventy nine for the first few months before Shane became my cell made, I was held in Salah confinement once we were together, Shane and I needed each other, but also needed space so badly that the relationship became painfully intimate. I was not allowed to interact with other prisoners besides him and occasion

Sarah until the iranian government released us marking the end of my nightmare and hope for a new life. After my Welcome Home Party Jenny and I went for drinks and the next morning she came to my parents' house and woke me up. I felt like I was your girlfriend at the party. She said. I felt the same way. I said without hesitation, Jenny and I had acted together in our fourth grade- play free to be a family. In seventh grade. We played Ouija together in her attic in middle school. We dated, but I didn't, have the guts to hold her hand or kiss her at her, but mitzvah. A mutual friend call me soon after to tell me that Jenny just wanted to be friends which we remained through Highschool

in college and the is the following. We touch base every so often to see if we were growing closer or drifting apart. Jenny had e mailed me the day I was captured to check in, but I never had the chance to respond our sporadic rendezvous. When I made twenties replayed in my mind, while I was trapped behind fixed cement walls, a world away nine months into my incarceration, the authorities grant my mother a one time visit desperate information. I asked her about the political negotiations for my release and about our family and friends, and I asked her about Jenny. Jenny was in a serious relationship, then, but my mother afraid that the truth would upset me lied and said she didn't know if Jenny was with anyone sitting with me and my child

the bedroom. The morning after my party, Jenny explained that she had recently broke up with her boyfriend of a few years. We both knew we needed to take it slowly. She was affected by the break up and as a medical student in West Virginia was trying to focus on her studies I had little memory of the nuances of daily life let alone the nuances of a love life. I was twenty nine and had trouble ordering from a menu. I regimented my homelife to mimic my prison routines, cutting my nails on fry. Exercising at three hundred and forty five p dot m, but my friend saw me after my released. They said I seem baby like raw and skittish. I didn't know if I should return home to fill it. resume my job in Rural Oregon or try to rebuild the life,

I once had an Oakland California, Jenny and I started writing hand written letters to each other, which seemed more thoughtful and reflective than email. I imagined she would wax philosophical like she used to when she would send me letters at sleep away camp, but in her first letter she wrote bluntly, I don't want to have sex until I married I had not had sex for years, but I didn't let it worry me. I wrote back about the struggles with my newfound freedom. Free life was vast,

paired to a tiny cell, but my mind continued to linger in that confined space. It seem like ghosts of iranian prison guards were finding me finding my free life at the Motor Vehicle Department, the Department Office and the bank. The people will to me the same way they had they IRAN, I don't know you'll, have to talk to my boss, he's not in right now. It made me furious months after the party. Jenny and I became more serious, though love still didn't quite make sense to me hours wasn't at all like the relationships I was used to with my cellmate, the prison guards or the interrogators I didn't have to commit to a hunger strike or bang on the cell door to be heard, and this new way of interacting was welcome but more complicated. I took an open, ended visit to West Virginia to write my memoir, and

see how it went between us one night after writing about how Shane and I bicker over the petty details of our tiny cell, I couldn't fall asleep. I got angry with Jenny for her looked at me for the way she sighed in the middle of our conversations for leaving the bathroom light on. She cried as I carried on, ostensibly sensible about my feelings and demanding apologies, all the while remaining oblivious to the fact I was reliving the pettiness of my imprisoned existence. I didn't stop until she yelled, I'm, not Shane therapy stirred up questions about whether I was ready for an intimate relate. ship did. I need to find my own place in the world before I could be with somebody else

the history between Jenny and me made our reconnection so powerful. But how important was our past? Was I simply playing out a middle school fantasy. I visited my grandfather who had been a psychoanalysts since the nineteen fifties and he himself had laid on an endless couch for days a week for six years after fighting in world war. To the first question, he asked me what Did you know that you were arrested on my birthday? It please. him to think of Jenny and me ending up together. After all, he had fought the Germans with his middle school sweeties name Muriel, my future grandmother carved into the barrel of his rifle, though they hadn't dated for years. I told.

About Jenny and he told me that a loving relationship can be the most rewarding part of moving on. Jenny gave up her premarital sexual prohibition and we started to discuss having children. She flew with me to meet my father's relatives who live just north of TEL Aviv. Israel started bombarding Gaza while we were there. We prayed for peace at the western wall, painted our faces with dead sea mud and fell deeper in love on the flight back Jenny vomited, and I thought it was because of the turbulence and an effort to purge israeli politics from her system, but

She was pregnant. The eight months later Jenny went into labor in the apartment. We were sharing and Philadelphia. She practiced yogic breathing, sat in an inflatable pool. Thirty hours later I caught our son and placed him on her chest. It was July thirtieth the day before both my grandfather's birthday, and the anniversary of my detention, we gave our son the middle name as which in Farsi means free. Since my son had taken his play in the world. I could no longer Daly and finding mine we moved to Brooklyn. I began a graduate program to study history of all the apart

buildings in New York City, we unknowingly chose to move into the exact one. My grandfather had lived in after the war after you, Is a feeling utterly unsettled? I sensed I was now exactly where I should be finding love helped me find my way amid the tangles of history and it helped Jenny and me secure a place in the world where, like the aptly titled play from our childhood, we were free

to be a family, Joshua Jackson, reading Josh Footballs essay reaching out between the bars it's been almost two years since Josh wrote that peace will hear how he's doing today after the break. I love falling by five friend and I often play stalling, be together the I mean sitting next to each other playing individually and not cheating. Sometimes when I open up spelling bee- and I see that you have completed a few words on your own, I feel a little betrayed. Sorry, it may have happened to

I know you did it again. I have one friend who I will send screenshots from spelling bee of inappropriate words that I always get nervous that I sent it to my parents or something like that was my bad. It was like the first party together, and I wish that I think I got it see it J, a c k. We hit the jackpot I'm same is asking the digital puzzles editor for the New York Times. You can try, spelling bee and all our games at annoying times dot com, flash games, we're back its modern love. The pod cast a magnet Accra, Barney and now a pie script for a modern love, editor Daniel Jones and the author of this week's s, a Josh football,

One of the reasons I wrote the peace is that there was a set of coincidences, which I was grappling with, that I had struggled to make sense with I mean the the thing that really got me thinking about it was when I was looking for housing in New York City and the apartment. Building that I picked in Brooklyn happened to be the exact place that my grandfather moved into after he finished serving in World WAR two. So that was just too uncanny to Canada, but we really do When I was in prison, I felt like one of the things that was happening to my mind into my being, was thinner I was setting out any kind of coincidence, in serendipity. I mean the world was just so metallic and cold and mean there was metal breakfast cards. Rolling down?

You know the halls and I just all felt like so harsh and clingy, and there was this coldness to how I had to start to think in If everytime, I thought there was some sign, I was getting out. Well wasn't true, I realized it just magical thinking and so coming out of prison for me was sort the possibility for for these things to happen in a way that wages were not possible when I wasn't free so another habit of reading essays that are submitted to me and being food at all. Familiar with the story. So when Josh story crossed my desk

You know I knew this story. I followed the story in the news, so for me this was a different reading experience and I was so eager just from the start. They will. What? What is it like to be in this prison? What is it like once you're out and how does it affect near relationships and what I thought Josh did. Good job of is talking about in a how being in a prison and being in this. an ending. You really don't know where the end point is you don't have a sentence? You know you're not getting paroled at a certain point, you're just either in there or at some point, you're going to be released, and what does that do to you psychologically? So he just brings all baggage back from IRAN with him in the first time, I got an apartment,

I set up living on my own. After getting out of prison, I promptly locked myself out of the apartment and and left my keys in there, and I realized man I had into haven't been used to using keys in a long time. At one point, I remember noticing that almost every time I walked out of the door, I felt this sense of relief. I would like take a big sigh and I would really feel relieved and at some point I noticed, as I am always sighing when I walk out- and I was simultaneously adjusting and becoming aware of how much I was adjusting was hard to keep it all in mind. It was nice to see to how he was limited in so many ways: being able to get things going with Jenny and figure out what they were going to do he's so caught up in

control for understandable reasons, and in this case it was, it was good to have him pushed out of that zone of control where he thinks okay, things are moving along now, let's see where it's going to go for Josh and fellow prisoners, Shane and Sarah assured part of working through their experience, involved writing a book together. They tell their story in the memoir, a sliver of light, which was published in two thousand and fourteen and one of the things of coming back was getting used to not just Ilife live for America or whatever. It was also stepping into a whole new life role. I mean I was in the news for two years straight and people are recognizing me. A woman. A few months ago saw me

subway and, as I didn't say anything but as I was getting off, she looked at me and she said thank you and I kind of looked at her like like what four and she was like. It was a good book and it took me a long time to get used to remembering how much people had seen me the media. Josh is still in contact with Shane and Sarah who are married and live in California. John. Jenny or married and live in New York City. Where he's a Phd candidate in history at and why you their son, I say it is now almost three years old and Josh is already beginning to think about how he'll eventually talk to his son about his imprisonment. Just this past week he was wearing his. What we his freedom shirt, which is the shirt from Jenny in my fourth grade play, which is free to be a family,

and so who's looking at it, and he was saying this is my freedom shirt and then he said daddy. What does freedom mean, and I just told him that he would have to find that out for himself Joshua tall author of this week's essay reaching out between the bar,

he's, also co, author of the memoir, a sliver of light. We also heard from modern love, editor Dan Jones, special thanks to Joshua Jackson for reading this week's peace he stars and show times the affair, which is now in its fourth season. More after the break. I love spelling my boyfriend and I often play spelling bee together. By together I mean setting so each other playing individually and not cheating. Sometimes, when I open up spelling bee- and I see that you have completed a few words on your own- I feel a little betrayed in theory. We may have happened

I know you did it again. I have one friend who I will send screenshots from spelling bee of inappropriate words that I always get nervous that I sent it to my parents or something like that was my bad. It was like the best party together, and I wish that I think I got it- see it J, a c k e L, Jack Jackpot panel run nice, I'm same as earth's sky. The digital puzzles editor for the New York Times. You can try, spelling bee and all our games at N Y Times dot com, slash games, or next week, Chloe Grace Moretz from our live performance at the province town film Festival. With the chip looming. We decided at my urging to break up for real this time.

I thought I would feel liberated. Instead, I spent my days mooning around the house crying or baking to distract myself from crying. I forced myself to remember that all this was exactly what I wanted. After all, love was so flimsy when held up against virtues like independence and freedom, so why does it feel like a vestigial arm? Something fused onto me that I couldn't get rid of no matter how hard I tried the Modern love is the production of the New York Times and W B you are Boston, NPR station, its produced, directed and edited by Jessica, Albert Caitlin, O Keefe, John Parodi and Emory seabirds. The idea for the modern open task was conceived

These are totally Iris Adler. Our executive producer, Daniel Jones, is the of modern love for the New York Times and adviser to the show music for the podcast courtesy of a pm magnetic already see annex.