On Iran war & devastation
Hi friends, I write to you from a place called devastation. Ten days and I ache with every breath as bombs drop on Iran, where my family and relatives live.
Stages of grief rage through my body; tears drop at every hint of privacy, my heart pretzels with horror, my shoulders weigh down under unbearable despair.
I read that bodies of infants, teachers, and poets are being dragged out from under rubbles of Tehran. Hundreds of innocents dead, thousands injured; I call my family again.
My brother says that missiles fly at night, the earth shakes again and again. My eyes sit in a pool of tears. I ask my partner, L, how they survived the Russian attacks on Ukraine, where they grew up. L says the first few days were pure agony. “Eventually, I got used to it”, L utters dully.
The knot in my heart finds a new way to kink itself.
I was born in the same year that an eight-year assault on Iran ended. Attempts by the West (via Iraq) to colonize the land failed at the cost of one million Iranian lives. Millions more, like my family, continue to carry the physical and emotional injuries of that war.
But the colonizers were never done with us. I’ve lived my whole life with the looming fear of attacks from Israel and the US. Like many Iranians, war has never been an abstraction for me.
I get ready for bed as the sun rises in Iran. I send the nightly ‘good morning’ message to my family, longing for a response.