Today I turned thirty-five. I am thinking about the past.
It is 2009, and we have only just begun to grow moustaches. We are gathering ourselves to finish what the students left unfinished in 1997. Our hopes are high. If it does not happen today, surely it will happen tomorrow. The days pass, and little by little everything falls apart.
It is 2017, and protests are growing again. This time they are about livelihoods, about a dinner table with less and less on it. Then comes 2019, and the Ukrainian plane, and its 176 passengers, and…
And then, the unbearable year of 2022. As Mahmoud Darwish wrote:
Blood in daylight,
blood in darkness,
and blood in speech.
Days passed like years. Behind every name was a story that belonged to us. Every young person who fell was a piece of us. Over these years, we have been torn apart, piece by piece.
Do you know how a bullet kills a person? First the memories disappear. Then, slowly, the names begin to fade. Hope vanishes little by little. Blood is the last thing to leave the body.
Perhaps that is why we were calmer during the war than at any other time. Perhaps blood was all that remained of death.
I have lived a long life: eight years longer than Neda, ten longer than Mohsen Rouholamini, thirteen longer than Mahsa, nineteen longer than Nika, and twenty-six longer than Reera and Kian.
I am sitting on a university campus, thousands of kilometres from my city, thinking about myself. My heart tightens at what Iran has endured, at the hopes scattered to the wind, at all the running that led nowhere, at friends who are now scattered across the world.
A young woman with golden hair approaches me with a smile and asks, “R U OK?” I manage a smile. Happy to have saved my life, she moves on to the next person.
Rain begins to fall. People run as if bullets are being fired. Thunder sounds like a fighter jet. A girl runs hand in hand with a boy. Perhaps she is the age Nika would have been.
And I ask myself: what colour was Zhina’s hair?
Postscript: R U OK? is a campaign that draws attention to depression and suicide. Yet it has ended up, to my mind, as an absurd ritual: someone approaches another person like a robot and asks, “R U OK?” The answer is “Yes,” and on they move to the next person, under the slogan that a conversation can save a life.