The phone call

I am out with lanterns looking for myself.

– Emily Dickinson

Every night I wait to see if my parents will call. Even though my dad has told me a few times that they would try to call every 48 hours or so. So calling every night is not our agreement. At night, I don’t silence my phone anymore so that I wouldn’t miss their call. Their call usually comes later, after I’ve fallen asleep around 10:45 pm. They always ask if I was asleep and I say no, because I want them to call whenever it is convenient for them even if I am asleep. I think maybe since the internet is shut off there, they never knew about the time change here but that doesn’t matter. 

I jump up, grab my phone and go to the living room so as not to wake my family up. I always feel so disoriented to say the least. Am I in the middle of a nightmare? Or has my life turned into a nightmare? Sometimes it is hard to distinguish between the two. My heart would race to hear the tone of their voice and try to understand how they were from their tone and not their words. But my dad, and especially my dad, knows how to keep calm in his voice. They always sound hopeful and in control. I am always the panicked one. 

What is there to say during a war? How would I ever know the extent of what is really going on there? How would I know how far those blasts were from them? I am pretty sure that they are telling me very little. They know how I am and they are trying to shield me as much as possible. That explains why I keep searching, reading and watching. Trying to put the pieces of the world’s most horrific puzzle together and make some sense of it. But the more I read, the more lost I feel. The more discouraged by this world and the unfortunate people who are running it. 

At what cost

Some men improve the world only by leaving it.

– Oscar Wilde

How can I explain the irony of being an Iranian-American? It’s never been easy and especially not now. How can the two biggest parts of my identity be at war with each other? How can I overcome this internal battle? But the real battle is not internal and is not really between Iranians and Americans. It is the disagreement among Iranians in the Diaspora and also among the Iranians inside Iran. Some people see this war as the only way to free Iranians and the rest see it as destruction of a beautiful country and its innocent people for oil.

I have to remind myself and others that we all have to allow space. We have to see each other's perspectives. Every person will align their thoughts, opinions, feelings and their mental soldiers where needed, to protect their own identity, family and their own existence. Each of us is carrying different scars. Talking to friends and family about this war is difficult. Non-Iranian people had a hard time understanding why there were Iranian people cheering on this war as bombs were falling on people in Iran? What repression had the Iranian people experienced that some of them inside Iran also preferred bombs over the current system?

But not everyone. I have friends who have lost their family members as a result of repressions and crackdowns but are still against the war. They do not see the light at the end of this very dark tunnel. Or they do but do not think that this was that light. They fear that the destruction was not really meant for liberation. At the end of the day we have to be able to talk to each other because now was the time that we needed each other the most. It’s hard to stay positive and even sane under so much stress and worry. We all ultimately want the same thing. But some people are willing to sacrifice more or have other people sacrifice more to get there.

I would Rather be Asleep

 

Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.

– Aldous Huxley

In times of crisis your body goes into a fight or flight mode. I wasn't sure what was happening in mine but I could see how the stress and worry had affected my digestion and my head. I could see how a prolonged war could make me fall apart if I didn't learn to manage my thoughts and limit my intake of harmful information. No matter how many times my dad had asked me to not watch the news, I was still watching. I couldn’t stop. This used to be my home. Where I was born. Where I grew up. Where I learned if the world is a place to be trusted. I had to understand what was happening in the world. I kept reading and watching as if by doing that I could somehow solve the problem.

My colleague has a technique of bringing the kids who are having a conflict together. Asking them to physically come close first and bring their hands together where their fingers could almost touch. Hands together! We have a problem. Amazingly, most of the time, it worked. Even though the kids were screaming, pushing, pinching or hitting each other a second before, they would trust that now that the teacher is here we can get close. She will help. She is to be trusted. She wants to resolve our problem. She is here to teach us. They would come together and each tell the teacher and each other what had happened, how they felt about it and what they think can solve the problem. Simple as that.

But why can’t the world do this? Did they not have caring adults and teachers when they were growing up? They did not know this technique? Is there no one to come and bring the countries together? Are they profiting more from hurting each other rather than solving their conflicts? Can evil be run out without mass destruction of other people, animals and the environment? Haven’t we tried peacefully only to be run over and slaughtered? Have we exhausted the hands in the middle option?

“I would rather be asleep these days than awake”, I told one of my colleagues when she asked me how I was doing. I told her it’s the first time in my life that my dreams are more comforting and closer to reality than reality itself. Things feel upside down.

I decided to give myself one day. I decided to stay away from the news, social media and basically my phone for a day. I felt it was necessary to recenter myself. I am physically on the other side of the world. Away from physical harm but my mind is tangled across the ocean. So all I have to do is focus on here. I can just wake up and pretend that there is no war. We can just go play music at the market, have lunch, get groceries, do the laundry and pretend like this is a beautiful, normal, hot spring day.

Hope

 

I wish children wouldn’t die. I wish they would be temporarily elevated to the skies until the war ends. Then they would return home safe, and when their parents would ask them: ‘where were you?’ they would say: ‘we were playing in the clouds.’
– Ghassan Kanafani

A few days before Nowruz my parents called me on a Thursday morning because they knew I would be home and not at work. I was a mess. I was drowning in my own tears. I had watched too many horrifying videos. Spent too long on my phone. I had allowed my morning to be blasted away. But they were in control as usual. They called to say they had been out buying some things for Nowruz. They had both been out but separately and they somehow found it funny that they had both bought bread. They had fed the street cats who were also affected by the war. Their spirits were intact during the most difficult time. Again, how is that possible? How am I the one who needs to be comforted when they are the ones under daily destruction, uncertainty and trauma?

I was not just sad but angry. I was not just angry at the world but at them for not leaving Tehran when they could. For not leaving to come to stay with me in Palo Alto just for a little while. How can they stay and help the poor and feed the cats when their own daughter is falling apart? I had missed work the day before because my stomach and head had taken the worst of the situation. When my mom said that they decided to stay in their city and home to help during a crisis even though they knew this would cause tension for me, I lost it. This was not tension. Every day life had tension. This was destruction. My heart felt like it was on fire and not in a good way. I felt like I hadn't been able to breathe a calm breath since it began. Since the beginning of January really with the government in Iran killing thousands of people just for wanting their basic human rights. Then our friend passed away in a tragic accident which sent us deeper into a dark hole. And now this. Why is this happening to us? What is happening to the World?

Then I started crying and I told them I was sorry to cause them even more worry and anxiety when all I had to do was ask them to stay safe and hope to see them soon. When all I had to say is that I appreciate their strength and envy their resolve. But I felt that I was not as strong as them. That maybe courage had skipped a generation. I told my mom that I was a wreck and had missed work and that I felt helpless not having any control over this situation.

Then I said I was never as good a person as them. That’s when my dad stopped me. He took over the phone and said: No. You are strong. You love us and you are worried. But you have to try your best to give us hope that this will end, that we will see each other again. And we have to do the same. That is our job now. We DO have control over things. We can control how this affects us mentally. We have to be strong for each other. You can do it, azizam he said. YOU can do it. Something snapped back in place in my heart.

My father asked me to write. I was writing. I was writing poems and crying. But maybeI had to write more. I had to pour my thoughts and worries out. He had asked me from the start of the war to not watch the news. He said leave it alone. Most of it is lies and the rest is out of our control. Listen to music, play music, cook, go for walks. He must have been doing all that himself or else how could they keep up their spirits? How can they be the light in such darkness? How can they have so much hope? I asked him that and he said that is what we have to do. We have to have hope. Hope, that this will end soon and that we will see each other again.

Sal Tahvil 1405

They broke

the world

Then handed us

the pieces

and called it

peace

– Karim Wafa-Al Husseini

The only person who called me just a couple of minutes after the ‘sal tahvil’ (countdown to Nowruz or Persian new year) of 1405, which was at 7:46 am on Friday March 20, 2026 was my brother. I was so happy to hear my phone ring because I thought it was my parents. I was hoping it was them so I would know that they are safe, that I could just hear their voice at the beginning of the year. But it was not them. It was my brother. We had actually been back in touch since the beginning of the war on February 28 when my parents could no longer call him for some reason but they could still call me and speak for a couple minutes at least.

When my brother called I was crying. I was listening to this sad song titled ‘Bazgashte’ which means returned on Spotify from an artist named NAVA who had a velvety voice while driving to work. I had come across this artist in my Instagram feed which was now mostly coverage of the war. I had reached the parking lot at work when he called, which was perfect timing as I normally don’t want to answer phone calls when I’m driving except for calls from my family.

I was crying and he sounded happy as usual. He said Eidet Mobarak Aidoo. I said how can you be so calm? How are you not worried? How do you keep it together? He was laughing and saying why do you always act like everything is falling apart? I told him that after I had breakfast I heard from a video that the neighborhood where my parents lived in Tehran, was hit. He said they are not gonna get hit. They are fine. He sounded so sure. How can he be so sure? He was saying they are not after civilians as he had been saying from the start of war, but I assured him that civilians were dying in the thousands as a result of these strikes that were now entering the third week.

My brother had left years ago right before Covid, after which we kind of lost touch. Except for when there was a birthday or a text from the bank. Now we were talking again which was one of the good things for me that was coming out of this horrendous war. Although he didn’t think the war was so terrible. He was hopeful for a positive change in Iran as were many Iranians inside and outside Iran. But I was more skeptical. I couldn’t let myself believe that bombs could lead to a tuning point. I was more focused on the suffering of innocent people caught in the cross fire all over the region, on all sides of this conflict. What is the cost of change? How many lives? How many destroyed homes and families? What will be left after this is over?

Being a preschool teacher has changed me in so many ways. It has maybe naively led me to believe that we can try to create a brighter future for the world when we spend more time and effort nourishing the young soul as it is learning about the world. Teach children to trust the world because it protects them and takes care of them.

When the elementary girls school was hit in the south of Iran on the first day of the war, my heart shattered. The same way it was shattered every day over and over again when I would see images of children in Gaza being pulled out of the rubble. The images of children holding empty metal pots in a big crowd of hungry people to get food. The images of children playing with the ruins of cars and buildings. How can this be the start of anything good? Did they hit this school by mistake? Was this a miscalculation? Did AI decide this target? How can anyone call this liberation?

For every broken heart

use your words

not your hands

say stop! I don’t like that

I’ve said these words

every day

for months and even years

to children in my care

as countless children across the world

were stripped of their precious childhood

their education

their dreams

their hopes

their homes

their family

their safety

their very existence

how can I continue

how can I still believe

how can I not drop to the ground

in agony and despair

how can I care for a few

when the rest

are being erased

the hypocrisy 

the sharp contrast

the hidden lie

has been killing me 

much faster than

one day at a time

***

but I will stay and teach

for the strength of my parents

and thousands of people suffering

around the world 

for the resilience of nature

for the hope of peace

for freedom

for the love of animals

for the beauty of trees, flowers and sunsets

for as long as I can

for every stained backpack

for every broken doll

for every torn notebook

for every shattered imagination 

for every broken heart

The morning the sun didn’t rise

rivers of fire

"guided missiles, misguided men"

the morning the sun didn't rise

where do the birds fly to

where do the cats hide

in the city where

blood stained alleys

dissolve in acid rain

can the burnt trees still blossom

can this shattered season still change

will this sacrificed year ever end

caught between hell and under

fire on one side

bullets on the other

my father’s voice

coming through with static noise

is a chilling reminder

of the shortest conversations

during a different war

in a small phone booth

my selfless mother

I understand why you stay

I respect your decision

I envy your strength

and your kindness in crisis

I wish I had your courage

but here I am

drowning in worry

I come up for breaths 

every now and then

before the heaviness of my thoughts

pulls me under