Hamed to Saber · Dated 11 February 2026 in the original letter; published on the Persian site on 9 September 2026
Dear Saber,
Your letter has reached me. If you are asking how I am, the answer is not very well. The city I live in bears no resemblance to the city that lives inside me.
People here do not know where Iran is. They do not know how bodies can be piled on bodies. They do not understand what it means to run for your life, or how someone can grow old overnight.
The Iranians here are different from the people I know, too. For each person, time seems to have stopped at the moment they left Iran. The Iran they know is a world away from mine.
As I always have, when grief collapses onto me, I take refuge in industrial work. There are some kinds of pain that iron can bear. Like the old days in drilling, I work twelve hours a day, seven days a week.
I pour all my strength and all my shouting into the metal. I hope to make myself so tired that I cannot stay awake at night. It does not work.
When night comes, I am like someone from the war-scarred south of Iran. Every clip of the killings feels as though another child from my own neighbourhood has been killed. Again and again, grief for someone I have never met tears me apart. Yet I do not let myself miss a single image, in case I forget what has happened to us.
The next morning I wake at four, gather whatever pieces remain from the night before, and go to work like a dutiful migrant. Then the cycle starts again.
All the waters of the world are connected. Sometimes I go to the sea. In my imagination I can cross the Indian Ocean and the Gulf of Oman and reach the Persian Gulf. From there it is not far to the Karun. I walk beside the river and look towards the palm groves of Abadan.
You know, when a sailor drowns, people play cymbals and dammam drums to ask the sea to return the body. Every day I beat those cymbals and drums inside my head, hoping that Saeed Zeinali’s body might be found and his mother might finally know peace after twenty-five years. Hoping that Neda and Sohrab, Mahsa and Nika and Kian, and thousands upon thousands of others might return.
Some days I have played those drums in my head from morning to night. Still, I find no peace.
I read more history, endlessly asking which moment in the past resembles our own. Is there any hope of deliverance?
The day the internet went dark, I beat my head and begged God not to let Tehran become Aleppo or Srebrenica. And, to my grief, that is what it felt it had become. Curse history for repeating itself.
History tells us that today is the anniversary of a nation trying to drive out a demon and bring in an angel. Forty-seven years later, we are at the same point again, hoping that perhaps this time an angel will come.
Bahman is still taking blood, still swallowing us. We are still living through the consequences of that same Bahman.
I do not know whether we deserved freedom. I do not know whether we are repeating our fathers’ mistakes.
But no one can carry this weight of history and geography alone. We are condemned to keep striking the wall of tyranny until it falls.
If it happens in our lifetime, we will celebrate together. If it does not, we will pass the hammer to the next generation.
Yours,
Hamed
22 Bahman 1404 · 11 February 2026
Bahman is the Persian-calendar month in which the 1979 revolution culminated. The title also plays on the sense of continuing to suffer the consequences of that month. The comparisons with Aleppo and Srebrenica express the writer’s grief; they are not a claim that these events are historically identical. The names and elapsed period in the letter are retained from the original.
