I still wake up at ten to six. Nobody wakes me up. There’s no bell waiting anywhere, but this was my waking-up time when I was eleven, and my body is used to it. I open my eyes and hear my mother filling the kettle. I lie there for a while. I always get up because I don’t want to stay in bed and make the morning feel even longer.
The busiest ten minutes of my day were those before I left for school. I hung my uniform on a hook behind the door; it was black, with the white scarf folded over my shoulder. I would say, every night, “I’ll iron it”; almost every night I wouldn’t. I stand and eat bread while my mother says I should sit down, and I always shout, “I’m late.” I still remember how my little brother was out of the coverlet with one leg and still asleep while I had to get ready for school. I would then grab my bag. I liked the weight of it pulling on my shoulder. Nobody warns you that you’ll miss a thing like that.
The school was twenty minutes on foot. In winter, the road was muddy in places, so we walked on its frozen edge, holding each other’s sleeves so we wouldn’t go down. Fereshteh waited for me at the second corner. She was always early. She told me I was late even on the days she’d watched me running toward her from half the street away. We’d argue about it for exactly one minute, then run the rest of the way to school and arrive with no breath left, and our teacher would look at us and say nothing, which was somehow worse.
What comes back to me most from that classroom isn’t a lesson. It’s the sound of forty girls opening their notebooks at the same time. At the time it meant nothing special to me. Now I try to remember it every day. The math teacher was thin and spoke in a cold, flat voice. We were all slightly afraid of her, and all of us wanted her to call on us. She’d write a problem on the board and turn around, and hands went up everywhere.
I usually raised mine before I’d finished solving the problem, because I was certain I’d be done once she reached me. Sometimes I wasn’t, and I had to stand in front of everyone, embarrassed, when I got the answer wrong. The next day I raised my hand again. That’s the part I think about now. Not the algebra. The fact that I could raise my hand and no one thought it was unusual.
I stopped in grade nine. I’d like to say there was a moment when we knew school was over. There wasn’t. No announcement in the yard, nothing that looked big enough to remember. A neighbor told us while I was washing dishes. I remember the water was still running when I heard the news. My mother came into the kitchen a little later. She had already heard, and she stood in the doorway without saying anything. I looked at her face and knew before she said it.
For a while, I pretended it was temporary. Every evening I lined up my books on the shelf beside the window. “Math, Chemistry, Dari, English” squared off neatly, ready for a morning that hopefully would come. I told myself it would only last a month. Then I thought, maybe until the end of winter. After that I stopped counting the days.
The hard part wasn’t that afternoon. It was the mornings that came afterward. I was used to knowing exactly what I’d be doing at eight: a lesson, then another lesson, then break in the yard, where Fereshteh brought almonds from her uncle’s garden and we ate them sitting on the stairs. Now my mornings were completely empty, and I had never asked for that. I had bread to make, floors to wash, and tea for guests. I became good at cooking. I didn’t want to be good at cooking.
Fereshteh got married last year and now lives in another province. We talk on the phone sometimes. She asks, “Are you still studying?” and I say yes. There’s usually a small pause then before one of us changes the subject. We both know my yes isn’t the same yes it used to be. It means I’m holding on to whatever I can reach. My brother has a cellphone with a crack in the corner. When he comes back from work in the evening, he hands it to me for about two hours. That’s my school.
I started with a free app for learning English. Later, a teacher who’d left the country started an online class for eleven of us, three evenings a week. The connection is poor, so her voice cuts out in the middle of sentences, and we all sit there saying, “Teacher! We can’t hear you.” Sometimes there is no video, and sometimes there is no sound. When the power goes out, I sit in the dark holding the phone and waiting. If the class is still running when the power comes back, I rejoin. If it’s over, I open my notebook and do it myself. The notebook is cheap, with a green cover. English words are on the left, and the Dari meanings are on the right. Underneath, I write my own sentences.
My sentences are strange. “The river is patient.” “My brother forgets his keys.” Yesterday I learned the word “stubborn” and laughed, because my mother has been calling me that since I started walking. The plan is ten words a day. Some days I manage only five.
I used to think learning meant a room, a teacher, and a book on a desk. Now it mostly means sitting by a window waiting for the internet to work. People say you build your future brick by brick. I never really thought about what that meant. Ten words in a green notebook are a brick. One page of algebra from an old book is another brick, even when I have to check my own answers because I’m not sure my method is right. Fifty minutes of class when the internet holds from start to finish is another brick. That’s what I have to build with.
Bricks fall, too. In spring, my brother’s phone broke, and we didn’t have the money to fix it right away, so I lost three weeks. When I returned, the others had already moved ahead. I listened to everything in the lesson but understood only about a quarter of it, and when it was over, I put my phone face down and cried. I was embarrassed because people around me had real issues, and I was crying about this English class. It took me a day or two to understand that I wasn’t really crying about the English class. I was crying because something I had made for myself had come to a sudden stop. The next morning I went back through the words I’d missed. I didn’t understand all of them. I kept going.
There are good days. In March I finished a whole book in English—a children’s book about a boy and a horse. Nineteen days. I probably understood seventy percent. When I turned the last page, I sat on the floor holding it for a while. Nobody in the house knew why I looked like that, and I didn’t explain. I was thinking about the girl who used to raise her hand before she’d finished the problem, and how that girl is apparently still a part of me.
Three months ago I started teaching my cousin Zahra. She’s nine. Two girls from the next house come along most days. We sit in our room in the morning, in those hours that used to stretch out so badly. I use my old grade six books. Zahra writes in enormous letters; one word can take up most of a line. When she gets something right, she looks up at me to check whether I saw. I always saw.
I didn’t plan any of this. I just wanted the mornings to be shorter. Now I wait for them. Sometimes I explain the same thing three times, nothing happens, and then her whole face changes; she looks down at her notebook and smiles. It’s not like school. I know. But these mornings are the only time I feel useful.
My books are still on the shelf. The covers have faded on one side from the sunlight. Sometimes I take one down and find my own handwriting in the margins. In the chemistry book, next to a formula I never really understood, a note in blue pen reads: “Ask teacher tomorrow.” I never asked.
Sometimes I wonder who I’d be if school had just continued, boringly, the way it was supposed to. Maybe I’d know that formula. Maybe Fereshteh would still be standing at the corner where we used to meet, telling me I’m late. Ten to six. I get up, help my mother, teach Zahra, write new words in the green notebook, do a page of algebra, wait for the electricity. Some days I do a lot. Some days I close the book after ten minutes and don’t open it again. Some days I look at the shelf and wonder how much longer those books will sit there. I still open them.
That girl writing “Ask teacher tomorrow” had no idea tomorrow might not arrive. I wish she hadn’t had to find out. I’d also rather not disappoint her. I still haven’t returned to school, and I don’t know when I will. But ten words a day, one page, one class, one book finished in nineteen days, one nine-year-old girl looking up from her notebook to see if I noticed, that’s what I have. They’re small from a distance. I’m not sitting at a distance.
Atifa Haidari
July 9, 2026
