After the Lion and Sun Revolution and the massacre of citizens, the American president, Donald Trump, promised to save Iran. We have seen the repression and killing for years while other countries stood aside, saying that Iran’s domestic affairs are not their business. Some said Trump would never do anything for the sake of Iranians but only for American interests, and I believed them. Whatever the reason, I wanted him to act as he had said that help was on the way. Months passed but nothing happened—only more news about negotiation.
On the morning of March 3, 2026, I was revising the English translation of a book I had recently finished, hoping to send it to the publisher by the end of the week, when I heard a blast and instinctively looked up. I listened, but everywhere was quiet. I must have imagined it, I thought and continued working. But for the first time in my life I found the silence disturbing. Even the usual sounds of cars passing down the streets and barking stray dogs were absent. I checked Instagram to see if there was any news. “Still nothing,” I murmured, turning off the VPN and putting my cellphone away. At 9:50 am my mobile rang. It was Ahmad, my elder brother. He managed a large warehouse in Tehran and was supposed to be going on a mission to Tabriz to make an inventory audit. The blast and Ahmad’s unexpected call suddenly formed an idea in my mind, “Something that I had been waiting for had finally happened.
“The war has begun,” Ahmad said. I had imagined this for years, but when it finally happened, I stared at the pen in my hand for seconds, unable to move or write.
“The war has begun,” he repeated. “Beit-e Rahbari was bombarded by Israel and America this morning.” My eyes shone and a smile appeared on my face. Still, I refused to express my feelings as my father had convinced me that our conversations were being listened to. My happiness about the war embarrassed me, because innocent people were being killed. But I had watched how people were sent into prisons and protesters were killed in the streets. I believed that this war was the only way to destroy a system that was destroying our lives. “I tried to call Mom and Dad but I couldn’t,” he said. “Just tell them that I am OK.” He was with his colleagues and sounded guarded, so I decided not to ask him more questions.
“I will. Don’t worry. Take care of yourself,” I pleaded. Ahmad had flown to Tabrize but now the war brought new dangers. “How will you return?” I asked. He didn’t answer. “Ahmad! Do you hear my voice?” The line had already gone dead. The sound of the explosion I had heard was real.
Just a few weeks before, I had a dream about the war. I was at home when loud explosions broke the silence. I ran toward the window. Soldiers were running through the street. Then another explosion shook the ground beneath my feet and smoke rose in the distance. There was a large electronic board in the street which showed the number of the regime people who were killed and every second the numbers increased. I woke up from that dream, but now it seemed that world events had plunged me back into it, irrevocably.
Why didn’t Ali, my husband, call me? I wondered. What if something has happened to him? I called, but he didn’t answer. I stared at his name on my phone’s screen not knowing if I was going to lose him or not. The Internet had been shut down again which frightened me even more than before. How could I send the draft I had written? Without Internet I could no longer communicate with the publisher or share my work with the outside world.
Before the war, I had openly posted anti-regime messages and comments online. Now I had no idea what would happen if the regime found me. If the regime came looking for me, it would not be only my life at risk. My parents, my husband, and my brother’s family could all pay the price. The thought of them being in danger because of me was unbearable. I kept trying to call my parents but I couldn’t get through. I called Ali again but he didn’t answer. I imagined him caught in a building no one could reach while bleeding. Even worse, I imagined him dead, killed by one of the projectiles. I wanted to hear his voice, I needed proof that he was still alive. Then, I decided to call my brother-in-law. My nephew, Mohammad, answered. He was thirteen years old and loved computer games, though he hated school. He always wished for the war so he would not have to go to school. Only children could imagine war as something that could cancel school rather than lives. And today he got what he wanted. “Where are you?” I asked.
“Mom took me out of school and now we want to get my sister from school, too,” he said.
“Are you OK?” I asked.
“Aunt, there were bad explosions here,” he explained. “Our teacher called the class off, sending us home.” I knew that he was frightened now as everything made him scared, even the flying insects.
“Did you download a blasphemous digital game?” I tried to distract him.
“Yes, and when I get home I will play it,” he said happily. “And our classes are going to be online.” I asked him to give the phone to his mother. After a few seconds I heard screaming and crying. My brother’s wife was shouting and saying something that I couldn’t understand. “Nasrin! Nasrin!” I called her name. But the call was disconnected. I tried to reconnect but each failed call made me more worried. Cold sweat settled on my forehead and questions piled up in my mind. “What happened? Why did she scream?” I didn’t have the answer. I needed to see them with my own eyes but I didn’t know how.
I walked down the hallway, through the living room, and into the bedroom. The silence inside the house was louder than the explosions outside. I sat on the edge of the bed, looking at the phone in my shaking hands. I called again to no avail. I threw the phone on the bed, and went to the kitchen. “A cup of coffee would be a help,” I whispered. Then I changed my mind, and drank a glass of water instead. I will call a car and go to see my parents. The idea came to my mind when I received a call from my mom. It was a relief to see her name on the screen. “I was worried about you,” I said. “The war has begun.” It was the first she’d heard of it.
“Really?” she said. “God will protect us.” She believed that war brings destruction and insecure life as she had lived her youth during the eight-year-war between Iran and Iraq.
“Ahmad is OK too,” I told my mom. “He is in Tabriz.” After fifteen minutes of talking, I ended the conversation. “Send my hello to Dad.” I couldn’t focus on my project. How will Ahmad come back? Why did his wife scream? Where is Ali? My mind was filled with questions I could not answer. I decided to see the stray dogs outside and feed them. These innocent animals made me happy and helped me to find peace. I bought two cartons of milk and began to whistle. Mommy dog and her puppies showed up. There were six puppies born during the Lion and the Sun Revolution, and now they’d grown. Seeing them grow larger each week was proof that life continued despite what was happening around us. The puppies drank the milk. The mommy dog laid on the ground and closed her eyes. The smallest puppy with his large ears wobbled over and licked my finger. “How cute you are!” I exclaimed. These puppies knew nothing about politics, revolutions or war. To them, the world was warm hands feeding them, or, too often, killing them. Watching them, I wondered how human beings could create so much destruction while these little creatures only wanted to eat and play. I envied them. Suddenly in the distance something exploded. The dog raised her head, pricking her ears to listen carefully.
“That’s OK. Just a special place belonging to the regime was targeted,” I said smiling and scratched her head. The dog kept listening as the explosions continued. People came to their windows and looked into the distance. Puppies scattered and began to bark. I put the smallest one on my feet and looked at the sky. A missile was passing through the sky. I thought it belonged to the regime. Where are you going? I wondered. Are you heading toward American bases in Arab countries, or toward Israel? With no clue about the answers, I went inside, heading to our apartment. Then Nasrin called. She had taken her children to her father’s house. I asked about the scream. “Bahar came out of school crying, and I lost my control. I was worried that she was injured,” she explained.
“Is she OK now?” I asked.
“She cried herself to sleep,” Nasrin said. “Now she is playing with her bird.”
“How is Ahmad? How will he make it home?” I asked.
“He is going to come back by bus,” she said. “But he is OK.” I breathed a sigh of relief and went home. I didn’t call him again but sent a message to him through Eitta, an Iranian digital platform: “Please let me know when you come home.” I was about to turn the key to open our door when someone suddenly said “boo!” from behind me. I screamed. It was Ali. He was on the way home already, so he hadn’t answered my calls. “I thought you were dead,” I whispered. “Why didn’t you call me?” He didn’t say anything. I wanted him to hug me, to tell me what he had seen. I was worried about him.
“I need to take a shower,” he said.
That night my mother called to check how I was and to tell me the important news. “Khamenei is dead.”
“Really?!” I said. “Tell me more.”
“Just a few minutes ago state television announced it,” she whispered as if she was telling me a secret. “In the US-Israeli attacks, some high-ranking officials, including Shamkhani and the family of Khamenei, were killed.”
I did not mourn for the dictator. Instead I mourned for the people who had reached a point where death seemed to be the way toward freedom. “Mom, thanks for letting me know.” After hanging up, I remained motionless in the darkness. The dictator was gone, but the system that had claimed so many lives still remained.
It was 1:00 in the morning and my brother hadn’t gotten home yet. It was an hour since we last spoke by phone. “Where are you now?” I had asked.
“We have just passed Karaj,” he replied. “Go to sleep. I’ll send you a message when I’m home.” But I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t stop wondering how he would get home in the middle of a bombardment in Tehran. I went to the window. The sky was full of stars. To me, every star was a person who had been killed for the freedom of Iran. “Keep my brother safe,” I prayed. Two hours later Ahmad called. He was home, and so I could sleep.
During the bombardment, our house shook violently several times. The windows opened due to the strength of the explosion, and the glass of the windows cracked. While the house trembled beneath the force of the explosions, making neighbours and people in the vicinity rush out, I stayed home, drinking a glass of black coffee and reading a book. The following days my neighbours came to me and asked, “Aren’t you afraid? Everyone was out but you and your husband weren’t!”
“We are safe at home. There is no need to go out.” I smiled. They looked at me as if I had lost my mind. After years of living under fear, the explosion no longer had the power to frighten me. Later, I read in the news that people had come to the streets to celebrate Khamenei’s death, but the IRGC and Basij opened fire on them. They even shot at people through their windows while they were celebrating or chanting a slogan from inside their homes, “Khamenei (like) Zahak, we finally pulled you under the soil.”
From the first day a suspicion began to circulate about the Shajare school and it only grew stronger over the following weeks. According to reports shared on international TV channels, the children had been massacred in an American-Israeli bombing. One day, I went to buy bread. I was standing at the bakery line when people began to argue that the United States had bombed the school, and a few questioned why the school had remained open after the war began. “The children had deliberately been prevented from leaving,” an old woman said. Because my father wasn’t with me, I felt free to express my opinion. “Why should the military base be built next to the school?” I asked. “To protect them,” a young boy replied immediately, then everyone became quiet. It was my turn at the counter: “Three sangak breads, please, one with sesame.”
After everything I had witnessed over the years from 1978 to 2026, I couldn’t ignore the possibility that the regime itself was responsible. Over the following days the explosions became part of everyday life. When Israel and America hit the Marvdasht Petrochemical Complex, the war reached a new front: the price of plastic products began to rise. The thin shopping bags we used to carry our groceries from the supermarket, plastic bottles of mineral water, coca, soft drinks, and fruit juice all became more expensive. The situation became even worse after damage to Isfehan’s Mobarake steel complex. The prices of aluminum sheets, canned fruits, and preserved foods went high because it was expensive to produce cans and metal containers.
Just before this happened, our home water boiler broke down. Since the repair and maintenance costs were too high, we decided to sell it and buy a new one. The moment we sold our boiler, it was announced that these products would no longer be available until further notice. A week later, the item was made available and the new price was shocking. We ended up buying a wall-mounted water heater that was cheaper. The war was no longer about the explosions alone. It was also about the calculations that families made every day about what they could afford. Reza was sitting on the sofa, staring at the corner of the wall. I knew that look. He was thinking about the future, calculating the money and the food we had. I began to wonder how long our savings would last if we could not return to work. Bombing was visible but poverty wasn’t. It crept slowly and quietly into our life before we even knew it.
On March 16, 2026 (25 Esfand), my father called in the evening. “Ali Larijani is dead,” he said sadly. I was cleaning the windows when I answered, and the dogs saw me and approached. Two of them sat quietly under the window, while the other two wrestled over food that I didn’t have with me. Whenever they saw me, they expected me to feed them. One of them stretched up, trying to reach the edge of the window.
“Oh, no! How could Israel and America do this?” I said, raising my voice above the dogs’ barks. But inside, I wished that Ejei, Ghalibaf, and Araghchi would meet the same fate.
“Are you outside?” my father asked. He was curious about the dogs.
“This time the dogs came to see me,” I said, laughing.
As the war continued, more police stations and Basij bases were destroyed. “The Basij can’t stay inside their bases anymore,” a person said into the camera, filming the scene. “They sleep in their cars or under bridges.” For the first time, those who had terrorized people seemed to be afraid. Soon, checkpoints appeared at the entrances of cities. “The regime stopped every car, and searched people’s phones,” one of my brother’s neighbors told him. “They even searched their bodies. If they found bullet scars from the Lion and Sun Revolution, protestors would be accused of working for America or Israel.” He continued. It wasn’t just the searches that frightened me but realising that the smallest things like a scar or a photo could destroy a life. I thought about my phone, where I had saved all my stories and drafts. If they checked my phone and read them, I would be in trouble. I didn’t want my stories to be imprisoned in Iran like me. The world needed to know about these events. Although I had backed up my writings and saved them somewhere safe, deleting each one felt like burying a part of myself deep in the ground.
During the war, Tehran was targeted every day, and my nephew, Mohammad, was afraid. “At midnight when explosions shook the windows, he woke immediately, ran into the living room and hid under the table or behind the sofa,” his mother told me. The imaginary enemies in his games had been replaced by real explosions and the search for somewhere to hide. Mohammad wanted to stay with his grandparents so his father brought him there. I went too, to be with my nephew. Every day we followed the news, discussed what was happening, and played games. Sometimes, when the explosions began, I watched him. I wondered what he was thinking about. One day, when we were talking about the possibility of regime change, Mohammad asked me, “Aunt, the regime will change right?” I paused for moments before answering. He wasn’t asking like a curious child to have answers to his questions, but he was asking so that he could believe that tomorrow would be better. I wanted to reassure him, but I myself wasn’t sure. So I told him about another dream I had. “In my dream, people came into the streets, carrying Lion and Sun flags. They were no longer afraid and large flags waved in front of the crowds. They raised their fists and called, ‘Long live the Shah. Long live the Shah.'” I wanted him to believe in my dream.
Soon I was home again with Ali. Because of everything I was seeing, the war, and even my dreams, I had become convinced that the regime was finally coming to an end. But, amid all the destruction and our struggles for survival, just when Trump threatened to destroy the regime’s infrastructure, he declared a ceasefire. He said that diplomacy was the better way to reach an agreement.
I didn’t expect it. I checked the news. The ceasefire was real. I stared at the screen, reading the words again and again, weeks of hope collapsed by a single sentence. “Why did this happen?” I had a terrible headache that made me take two pills. Outside, children played as though nothing had happened. I felt foolish for believing that this time would be different. My mind was occupied with unanswered questions, I couldn’t understand why Trump had done this. If the goal had been diplomacy, why did the war begin? To me, it was even worse than what Obama had done. Reza was sleeping, or maybe he was pretending. “They will never free us. They will forget we exist,” Ali had said to me weeks after the war began. I argued with him and since then we hadn’t spoken.
I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t stand the atmosphere as it was suffocating. So I dressed up and went out. Mummy dog barked, wagging her tail, and then she began running toward me. One by one the puppies showed up, unaware that something inside me had broken. They jumped, barked and chewed my clothing as usual. But this time was different for me; the excitement was gone and, with it, hope. And for the first time since the war began, I cried for the revolution that had failed, for the people who had died believing freedom was near, and I cried for the torment of the ceasefire.
