My generation was born into war; when two men drunk on power and intoxicated with revenge dragged their nations into an eight-year inferno.
A war that devoured futures, reduced cities to ash, and left only bones and deafening silence in its wake.

And then for years, my country, my people, clawed through that darkness, fighting the invaders, the mullahs, the clergies, the terrorists, and their fevered, monstrous creed.
We breathed in terror for years. The trauma lives under our skin. It is stitched into our dreams.

And now, my land bleeds again.
There are bombs falling through the indigo dome. There is blood, there is fear.
Corpses flung into neighbours’ shattered walls…

And yes , there is Schadenfreude. A cold, precise word for the dark thrill of vengeance.
Leave it to the Germans to coin a one-worder that icily depicts hatred and joy. The philosophers and the thinkers. I digress…
Monsters kissed by death in their offices. Rapists silenced in their beds. War criminals reduced to nothing.
There is justice in it. Alas, there is rot in it, too.

But war is still war. And it devours everything with an insatiable hunger.

And I am one of the “lucky” ones. I am away. My child is safe. He shall not hear the booms and the bangs and the cracks and the shrieks. And yet my soul wails as it remains in my land, roots in its earth, Iran’s wind in her hair… Proving one thing; no matter how far you are and how long you’ve been away, Iran will never leave you; in the most devastatingly beautiful and delicately haunting way…

To my darling friends, thank you.
For your messages, your compassion, your refusal to look away.

May war never know your name.