All relationships are difficult and strange in their own ways but I guess sibling relationships are always the most complicated ones.

A sibling is like a friend you didn’t ask for. It’s impossible to figure out whether you hate, like, or love each other. Maybe it’s all at the same time, but the truth is, you don’t really have to figure it out.

About a month ago, I watched The Darjeeling Limited (2007); a film written and directed by Wes Anderson.

It immediately became one of my favorite Anderson films, right next to The Royal Tenenbaums (2001). I soon realized it is no coincidence that they’re both about the notion of a troubled family, more specifically centered around sibling relationships.

As you grow older and find your own identity and place in the world, siblings become strangers who have known each other their entire lives.

The film follows the journey of three estranged brothers who’ve lost their father.

The brothers are not trying to become closer; they are trying to remember what closeness once felt like. Siblings are not necessarily the people who know you best, but the people who knew your earliest self. It’s strange how someone you once shared a bedroom and childhood with can eventually become someone you barely understand.

It’s funny how people can live through the same childhood and still shape entirely different memories from it. The brothers each react to grief differently because they remember their family differently. Just as they interpret Jack’s stories in conflicting ways, each of them carries their own version of their father, their upbringing, and ultimately their reality. Meanwhile, none of them are fully right.

As Virginia Woolf writes in Time and Memory:

“Memory is a mind’s condition which implies the consciousness of the future. When we remember, we create again, here and now, something lived which isn’t a duplication of itself but a representation of the past in the present which has a new meaning.”

And perhaps this is why the death of a parent can affect siblings so differently. Losing the same father does not mean they all lose the same person. Each brother is grieving the father he knew, the childhood he remembers.

As different as the brothers are, they manage to find a common ground and become closer by the end of the film. At first, I thought it’s the pain, guilt, and grief of having lost their parents that brings them together. Then i realized, parents are not the only thing siblings share. They also share a childhood, history, and memories. They are not only coming to the terms with the loss of their father, but also the loss of their childhood; an era that is now officially over forever. They are mourning their shared history.

Which brings me to Freud’s concept of mourning and melancholia.

Freud argues there are two responses to loss: mourning and melancholia.

Mourning is the conscious, painful process of confronting the absence of someone or something we have loved. The world loses its meaning. Everything feels heartbreaking to bear. For Freud, mourning is an acceptance journey; a process where the mourner gradually learns to live with the emotional attachment from what has been lost.

By the time the traveler reaches the destination, they eventually feel motivated to let go of the pain and participate in the real world.

Melancholia, on the other hand, is more complicated. The grief remains a part of the unconscious mind. The absence of the loved object becomes one with the mourner’s mind. Instead of thinking “I have lost someone”, they’ll think “A piece of me is lost.”

I don’t think the Whitman brothers can be neatly divided into these two categories, but I can see elements of both responses in the way they deal with their father’s death.

Francis seems to approach the journey almost consciously as an attempt to mourn. He wants their trip to mean something. He wants to transform their grief into a ritual, perhaps because giving the loss a purpose makes it easier to bear.

Peter, on the other hand, seems unable to separate the loss of his father from his own sense of failure. After he fails to save the young Indian boy, he tells his brothers, “I didn’t save mine.” With guilt in his voice. As if he blames himself.

So what if the person we lost, was also a part of our identity?

What interests me about Freud’s theory is that it makes grief about something within ourselves than someone who once existed outside of us.

Grief and love have always been the most confusing feelings I’ve ever experienced. It is difficult to comprehend them, it’s also really complicated to deal with them. They make people behave as children. We don’t experience solely the loss of the person who’s passed away but also a version of us and our memories.

In a way it divides people but also unite them. Because in order to move forward from the loss, you have to have the courage to look at what has been lost.

For the brothers, it reopens wounds and at the same time it’s revealed to them that they share the hurt in those wounds.

Maybe this is why the train setting feels so important to me. Grief forces them to deal with what they chose to leave behind, as they are moving to the next destination in life.

“I’ve got to get off this train”

The setting of the train particularly resonated with me. I might be reading too much into it, but being stuck on a train with your family members who you don’t necessarily get along with, sound pretty metaphorical to me —an English major girly who finds metaphors in everything.

I think anyone with an unhappy family, grows up daydreaming about getting away. Yet those who manage to do so, soon notice that there is no country or city far enough to get them away from the trauma of an unhappy family. They, specially your siblings, have been integrated into your soul and identity. There is no getting off the train until you address the damage. That’s why the line “We haven’t located us yet.” seems so poetic.

Perhaps the reason they haven’t “located us yet” is that they don’t really know how to be together anymore. They have learned to be Francis,Peter, and Jack on their own. They have forgotten how to be brothers.

In the beginning, they are all performing versions of themselves in order to communicate: Francis performs leadership, Jack performs detachment, and Peter performs indifference. As the film moves on, those performances slowly crack.

Francis holds onto his brothers’ passports because he has felt abandoned his entire life; first by his mother’s departure, then by his father’s death, then by his assistant, and now perhaps by his brothers too. Family knows exactly where your wounds are because they watched them form.

“I guess I still got some healing to do.”

I think as children we are sometimes burdened with the roles that parents or our other siblings force us to be. As we grow older, we learn to break free from some of them. Still, somehow whenever the family gets together, we slip back into some of those roles. Perhaps, that’s why the holidays are so difficult to get through. (Shoutout The Bear Christmas episode)

I saw the same thing happening with the Whitmans. Without considering the death of their father, it’s visible that they all have suffered a trying year as adults. Once together, they are treating each other as they would have as children.

It makes me wonder: Can we ever meet our siblings as adults, or do we always meet them partly as the children we remember?

Trying to get to know the adult version of your siblings, who are themselves trying to heal, can feel like obligation rather than choice at times. But loving your family and carrying its weight are not the same thing. It’s swallowing the hard pill that your family are just people with unhealed trauma. The same as you.

For years, I believed cutting ties was the right decision. In many cases, I still do. Every act of love eventually began to feel heavy and suffocating. The friendship was a constant state of misunderstanding one another. No amount of trying to revive the friendship felt enough. At the end, we held onto our resentment and grudges. I reached a point where leaving felt healthier than staying.

So why, after all this time, did I still hope to see their names on my screen?

I started thinking about what it actually means to miss someone.

In Persian, when we long for someone, we say, delam barat tang shodeh“ which translates to “my heart has grown small because of you.” I’ve always loved that expression because it puts the emotion of longing into words better than any poem. It suggests that absence doesn’t merely create distance; it changes the shape of us.

Perhaps that’s what missing someone truly is; to miss someone is to have lost a part of your heart, yourself, and your identity.

What hurts, even long after it happens, is not just losing the person but the realization that they had become a part of you and your identity without noticing. Every meaningful relationship changes us. When that relationship ends, we don’t simply lose a person. But we also lose a version of ourselves that only existed beside them.

There are certain struggles and memories that are limited to a certain time in my life. The people who were then and there for me will forever be a huge part of how I approached those troubles and a main part of how those struggles affected my personality and shaped me into today’s person.

When I think about the people I’ve lost, I don’t just miss the person. I miss the connection I once shared with them as well. I miss being so easily understood and loved. I miss being loved and loving free of the anxiety of consequences. I miss the language we created together. The jokes no one else would understand. The comfort of being known without having to explain myself.

There is one friendship I return to more than the others. At the time, I thought distance was the kindest thing I could offer them. Now, almost three years later, I reread our conversations and see a tenderness I wasn’t capable of recognizing then. I still don’t think I could’ve possibly loved her the same way she loved me. Not at least in a way that would have been honest. I only wish there had been a version of the story where neither of us had to lose the other.

Missing someone can be as much about the future as it is about the past. Sure, I miss the moments but more dearly I yearn for a chance to ever have another conversation as before. To suggest her films I think she might enjoy. I found myself wishing there was a way we could watch Project Hail Mary (2026) together and discuss it.

I mourn the possibilities that might’ve turned into new memories.

Love can be a gift and a burden at the same time. Back then, every act of kindness from her felt like an obligation I couldn’t fulfill. The more she loved me, the more I felt I was disappointing her simply by being myself.

I realized that I always wish for a way that we could’ve stayed friends. I don’t feel gratitude towards it ending even though it was hurtful to us both. Neither do I wish to be back in that situation.

Yet somehow there is a strange gratitude that comes with hindsight. I can now recognize the generosity of the love she offered me. We often don’t understand the value of being loved until long after we’ve stopped being loved. Maybe that’s another reason we miss people—not because we want them back, but because time teaches us to appreciate what we couldn’t fully see while we still had it.

It is easy to mistake that feeling for wanting someone back. But those aren’t always the same thing. I’m not really sure if they can be separated though.

Sometimes I think I do miss the person. And sometimes I think I even miss feelings that weren’t entirely good for me. And it scares me to think about that. Why would I miss friendships that made me unhappy? Why would I feel nostalgic for relationships I once endured?

The answer, I think, lies in how memory works.

Sometimes, it is not in the form of missing but envying. Our memories aren’t definite. We remember them how we want to remember them. We are naturally emotional human beings, and in order to live on, our brain omits the trauma and pain. Love isn’t fading, pain is.

I’ve come to believe that nostalgia is about survival. It allows us to remember the good parts without having to relive the pain.

Familiarity tends to bring tranquility and puts us at ease. Psychologists have long suggested that our brain prefers predictive patterns over surprises. The closer we are to someone, the easier it is to predict their behavior. So it is no wonder why we get nostalgic about the people we once knew really well. Or at least we think we did.

We aren’t necessarily longing for who they are today. We are longing for the familiar version of them stuck in our memories—a person frozen in time, without changes, unbothered by time. A person that doesn’t do anything other than what our brain tells them to do in the memories.

Neuroscience offers another explanation. The same way we adapted our lives to their presence, the brain uses to adapt to their absence. Once the brain’s bored, it revisits conversations, memories, and imagined futures, almost as if it is trying to solve a puzzle that no longer has an answer.

I’ve come to learn that missing someone isn’t evidence that leaving was the wrong decision. It doesn’t erase the reasons a relationship ended, neither does it mean we want to go back.

Sometimes missing someone is simply realizing that they once were a part of us, and that place cannot disappear overnight. To miss a person is to have lost a chunk of your heart.

It is never really over. The love never vanishes into nothingness. It changes its name into an emotionally more sensitive feeling. When the person is gone, love becomes grief. It becomes longing. It becomes nostalgia. It becomes silence.

Yesterday, I realized I wasn’t waiting for a birthday message because I wanted those people back in my life.

I was waiting for confirmation that the version of myself who once loved them had existed—it wasn’t just a story in my head. We shared a love that was once there. A proof that those years were real, that those connections mattered, even if they couldn’t last.

it finally dawn on me, that is all missing someone has ever been:

Not a desire to return to the past, but a confirmation that someone once changed the shape of your heart, and even after they’ve gone, the outline they left behind remains.

I recently watched Faces of Death (2025), a remake of the cult franchise in which unknown actors recreate horrifyingly realistic acts of violence. At one point, Margot (played by Barbie Ferreira) asks a simple but unsettling question: Why are we interested in watching violence on screens? Why is it allowed?

When the film ended, I found myself on trial.

Why do I watch so many horror films? Have I become desensitized to violence? Am I simply curious? Or is there something deeply human about wanting to look at death?

We often talk about violence in media as though screens invented our fascination with death, when history suggests they merely changed the format.

I often see people online worrying about the popularity of true crime and what it may encourage. Yet I always think about how much worse our appetite for violence once was. Ancient Romans gathered in the Colosseum to watch gladiators fight to the death. Public executions drew enormous crowds. Newspapers once printed explicit photographs of war and murder. Today we consume true crime documentaries, horror films, and viral videos on social media.

This isn’t really a modern issue. It’s a human one.

Reading Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others only complicated that realization. She suggests that perhaps the real mystery isn’t why we look, but why we’ve always looked.

Looking, she argues, isn’t always an act of cruelty. Sometimes it is an act of relief. Images of suffering remind us that, at least for today, the catastrophe belongs to someone else. I am not ill. I am not trapped in a war. I am safe.

But Sontag also made me wonder whether our fascination with violence is connected to something even older than entertainment. Across religions and mythologies, suffering has often been tied to sacrifice, redemption, and transformation. Although those beliefs feel more distant in a secular world, I wonder if we still search for meaning in other people’s tragedies. Perhaps every true crime documentary or disaster story carries the quiet fantasy that, if we were in the same position, we would make different choices. We imagine ourselves escaping. We rehearse survival from the safety of our living rooms.

Then something else occurred to me: One of my favorite subgenres has always been horror comedy. If horror is, in some strange way, a rehearsal for survival, why do I laugh?

That question unsettles me even more than watching violence itself. My body reacts to these films in contradictory ways. I flinch and then, moments later, I laugh. The blood is too exaggerated, the timing too absurd, the performances too theatrical for the violence to feel real. Somewhere between fear and comedy, suffering becomes an outlook.

Is that harmless?

Or is it quietly desensitizing me to empathize with real suffering?

Tarantino and Martin McDonagh are two of my favorite writers. I’ve always admired how naturally they tell stories that are, at their core, deeply violent. Their films rarely present violence realistically. Instead, violence becomes stylized, choreographed, and almost playful. Blood sprays in impossible quantities, conversations continue through shootouts, and horrific acts take place with wit or irony. Somewhere between, violence stops looking like reality and begins to feel like fantasy.

Quentin Tarantino has defended this contrast for years. He argues that the audiences know the difference between fiction and reality. Stylized violence isn’t a celebration of brutality; it comes from the same imaginative realm as fairy tales, myths, or revenge fantasies. In that context, violent cinema offers something closer to emotional release than moral corruption.

Aristotle may have taken the same side on this argument. His idea of catharsis explains that tragedy allows audiences to experience fear, pity, and terror within the safe boundaries of art, in imaginiative forms such as theater, cinema, etc. Then, they leave the theater emotionally transformed, drained from violence. Rather than morally damaged and negatively influenced.

I wanted to believe that explanation… but another part of me wasn’t convinced.

Because if violence in the form of art can purge us, as Aristotle believed, why have philosophers, playwrights, and filmmakers spent centuries worrying that stories might also shape us?

Perhaps I had been asking the wrong question all along.

Why we watch violence is one mystery. What violence does to us after we’ve watched it is entirely another.

There’s a natural fear of what fictional violence might do to us. Every generation seems to rediscover the same anxiety: can stories create monsters?

I often find myself wondering if monsters are created by the media or if the media simply gives them a stage.

That question has haunted me ever since I watched Natural Born Killers (1994). I couldn’t stop thinking about it. On the surface, it’s a violent road movie about two serial killers. But beneath the bloodshed, Oliver Stone is asking something far more unsettling. Perhaps monsters don’t become famous because they kill. Perhaps they kill because they know we’ll watch.

The film seems convinced that America doesn’t simply produce serial killers—it produces celebrities. Mickey and Mallory aren’t famous despite their crimes. They’re famous because millions can’t stop watching them.

I don’t think the real question is whether media creates monsters.

I think the more uncomfortable question is whether media creates an audience for monsters.

What if our attention is what they’re competing for?

I don’t watch true crime because I admire murderers. Most people don’t. We watch because we’re curious. We want to understand the incomprehensible, the “why”. But curiosity has its own economy. Every click, every documentary we stream, every story we consume, every headline tells the media what deserves our attention. We aren’t glorifying violence, yet our attention can still transform violence into spectacle.

It’s an unfortunate cycle and it’s both deeply human and ethically complicated.

Centuries before television existed, Plato feared something similar. Once a poet himself, he grew suspicious of poetry and storytelling. He believed that art could shape character and encourage people to imitate destructive behavior. For him, stories weren’t harmless entertainment. They had the power to influence the soul.

But perhaps Plato’s fear gives stories too much power.

No one leaves Kill Bill and becomes a murderer simply because they saw blood on a screen. Human beings are more complicated than that. Violence is shaped by childhood, trauma, neglect, ideology, opportunity, and countless other forces. Fiction may influence us, but it is rarely the whole story.

Trauma can profoundly shape a person’s behavior, and understanding that complexity doesn’t excuse violence.

Aristotle almost certainly disagreed with Plato. He believed tragedy offered catharsis rather than corruption. Instead of planting destructive urges, art gave audiences a safe place to experience fear, grief, and anger without acting on them.

The first time I truly found myself caught between these two positions was when I read Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman.

The play asks a question I still can’t answer: if stories have the power to inspire violence, would censoring them prevent it?

When The Pillowman first posed this question to me, I hoped I would reach an answer by the end of the play. Fortunately, McDonagh refuses to give a simple one.

Throughout the play, stories are treated almost like weapons. A series of murders resembles the writer Katurian’s fictional tales so closely that the police begin asking the same question Plato asked more than two thousand years ago: can stories make people violent? And if they can, should they be censored?

It is an understandable fear. If storytelling has long been one of humanity’s main tools for teaching, then it can also be used as a weapon. If stories can shape us, surely removing violent stories would make the world safer.

To McDonagh, however, that logic is flawed and I think he’s right.

Violence existed long before literature. Long before cinema. Long before television.

Life is not inspired by art. Art is inspired by life.

Stories do not invent cruelty. They give it a language, a reflection, and sometimes a warning. Censoring stories may remove the mirror, but it does not remove the monster standing in front of it.

I don’t believe we should be concerned about how gore is portrayed much more than we are concerned with it happening on daily basis.

It is a morbid truth that, as long as there is suffering to witness, human beings will look. We will wonder whether we would have survived. What we would have done differently. We will feel relieved that, for now, it is happening to someone else. What we should be concerned about is not fiction but the reality. History suggests that censorship rarely extinguishes curiosity. More often, it intensifies it.

Sontag writes that shocking images eventually fade from memory, and I don’t think that necessarily reflects a failure of compassion. If we carried every image of suffering with us forever, ordinary life would become impossible. Forgetting is sometimes less an act of indifference and more of a sign of survival. It is not faulty compassion but a way to make peace in living one’s own life.

By the end of this essay, I believe our concern should be with people rather than stories. With preventing violence rather than censoring its representation. Stories do not create cruelty from nothing. They reflect it, question it, and sometimes warn us about it. Our responsibility, then, is not only to be thoughtful viewers, but to build a society that gives artists fewer horrors to reflect in the first place.

Violence is not what fascinates us. Mortality is. Violence is simply one of the ways we encounter it. Perhaps we don't watch horror because we love death. Perhaps we watch because we are trying to understand it before it finds us.

I recently watched Supernova (2020), a film about Sam and Tusker, a long-term couple navigating life after Tusker’s diagnosis of early-onset dementia. During a road trip across England, they visit old friends, family, and familiar places while trying to come to terms with a future neither of them is prepared for.

I kept thinking about how Tusker and Sam love each other through the very things that define them. They are both struggling with the same reality, yet each expresses love in a language uniquely their own. The intimacy is constant, present even in their smallest exchanges and bits of playful banter.

There is a scene where Sam playfully taps his fingertips against Tusker’s arm. The gesture resembles the way he plays the piano. I found myself wondering: what could be more romantic than music itself coming from a musician? We often speak of becoming someone’s muse, but this felt more intimate than that. Sam’s love is expressed through movement, touch, and rhythm. He is a pianist, and so it made perfect sense to me that he is always reaching for Tusker, even if only to brush his fingertips lightly against his skin.

Tusker, meanwhile, is a writer. His words are both his weapon and his affection in disguise. He tells Sam he loves him almost immediately after meeting him. He reassures him before the concert. He comforts him when anxiety threatens to take over. Even his humor feels like an act of devotion. His jokes lighten the burden of painful truths, but they also communicate gratitude and tenderness toward the people he loves.

That is what makes his illness feel particularly cruel. A writer losing his words is a tragedy in itself. Yet Tusker understands that his own loss is not the only one taking place. At one point, he says that the hardest part is forcing Sam to mourn him while he is still alive. That was the moment I truly understood the depth of their relationship. Even in the face of his own decline, his attention remains fixed on the person he loves.

There is another scene in which Tusker speaks with Sam’s niece about supernovas. Yet he does not seem to be talking about stars at all. He explains that we are made of particles from different stars, each originating millions of miles apart. Listening to him, I wondered if that is how he understands love itself: as a series of impossible encounters. Countless people, countless lives, and countless acts of love unfolding across generations, somehow resulting in two completely different people finding each other.

Perhaps this is where youthful ideas of love differ from lived experience. We are taught to think of love as agreement, compatibility, or endless compromise. But love seems far more complicated than that. It is knowing how to argue without cruelty and how to let go without resentment. It is learning another person’s language and choosing to speak it, even when words begin to fail.

As Sam says, “It’s not about fair. It’s about love.”

Supernova is, in many ways, a film about impending loss. Yet what stayed with me most was not grief but translation: two people finding different ways to say the same thing for years, and continuing to say it for as long as they can.

The stars that made Tusker and Sam will remain long after they are gone. So will the music, the words, the jokes, and the small gestures that carried their affection. Love rarely survives in a single language. It leaves traces of itself everywhere.

There have been countless supernatural horror films made, many of them terrifying only in the moment. The horror that truly lingers, however, is almost always deeply human at its core. Damian McCarthy’s Hokum understands this well. Beneath its supernatural Irish folklore and ghost story aesthetics lies something much heavier: a film haunted less by spirits than by mourning itself.

What struck me most is that grief appears in the film long before any visible haunting does. Nearly every character seems trapped inside some form of emotional residue. Loss hangs over the Bilberry Woods Hotel before the narrative even begins to unravel its mysteries. The building does not merely contain sorrow; it seems shaped by it.

This idea has fascinated me for years now. The way Gothic fiction repeatedly transforms houses into psychological entities. Haunted homes are rarely just settings. They’re alive entities. They become extensions of the minds inhabiting them, absorbing madness, loneliness, guilt, paranoia, and grief until architecture itself begins to feel alive.

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe, which both happen to be two of my favorite literary works, and Polonsky’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968) has lead me to think on this subject for a while now. In all three works, the home becomes psychologically unstable long before it becomes overtly supernatural. The terror emerges from the unsettling possibility that human suffering can alter space itself.

Perhaps this is why haunted houses remain so compelling within gothic fiction. Grief is simply too immense to remain confined within the human mind alone. It spills outward into hallways, walls, silence, shadows, and empty rooms. The gothic imagines sorrow as architectural.

Gaston Bachelard touches on something similar in The Poetics of Space (1958), where he treats rooms, corridors, attics, and basements as metaphors for human consciousness itself. A house, in Bachelard’s writing, becomes almost inseparable from memory and emotional life. I have yet to finish the book, but while watching Hokum, I kept returning to this idea of architecture as psychology.

It is no coincidence, then, that Ohm is a writer. Writers in gothic fiction are often driven by the same dangerous impulse: the need to continue looking. Curiosity becomes inseparable from self-destruction. I think this is the first time that I watch a horror film and I am not yelling at the main character to not do whatever he is doing. Writers and intellectuals are carious people by nature, and add the heavy burden of guilt on top of all the unanswered questions. Woof. Obsession becomes inevitable.

If grief haunts the hotel, guilt is what keeps its doors open. Grief mourns what has been lost; guilt obsessively returns to what might have been done differently. Gothic fiction has always understood this distinction. Its protagonists rarely stumble into haunted spaces by accident. They are drawn toward them by unanswered questions, old wounds, and unresolved responsibilities. Perhaps this is why Ohm’s profession feels so fitting. Writers are rarely content with uncertainty. They revisit, revise, investigate, and search for meaning long after others have moved on. In Hokum, curiosity begins to resemble guilt itself: a refusal to leave the past buried.

The film felt familiar but it’s also original. The entire concept is very Kubrick-King-The-Shinning but it doesn’t feel recycled because it is a new set of characters with their own troubled heads and a whole new mystery. The familiarity comes not from imitation, but from shared thematic concerns. The Irish Bilberry Woods Hotel feels like a psychological trap. It’s a structure capable of absorbing and reflecting human damage.

It made me think of a more serious and scary version of Bodkin (the show) as well. I guess the fact that it had David Wilmot playing in both, did help.

Gothic fiction repeatedly returns to the same unsettling thought: that grief does not disappear quietly within us. Sometimes it reshapes the world around us.

I didn’t want to write about this, because writing would mean accepting reality as it is. More painfully, it would mean processing everything that has happened. I’m not sure I want to do that yet. But honestly, even forever feels too early to process massacres like this. Horrifying crimes took place eleven days ago, but staying silent about them feels like the worst crime of all.

I start each day by watching the news before I even eat. It’s my new coffee. The violent images on TV carry more shock than any cup of coffee ever could. I’m not sure what I expect to see when I turn it on, but every morning I watch with the hope of good news. When I tear up at the sight of families crying over the bodies of their children, I try to swallow my tears with a cup of tea. It doesn’t work. So I stare out the window.

This city—this country I was born and raised in, the one I love so deeply suddenly looks ugly. I look again. No, not ugly. Depressing. A blue-grey shadow hangs over the sky. It’s like a pearl inside a shell. A shell slowly crushing it, grinding it down until the pearl becomes as worthless as the shell itself.

It’s been eleven days since the internet shutdown. There’s no way to contact family or friends abroad. On the ninth day, we were allowed to make phone calls, but only for three minutes—and only if we called them. Incoming calls were blocked. It feels like living in a massive prison.

A friend told me that to speak to her sister, a student in Italy, they had to rely on a friend of her uncle’s wife—someone who happened to be traveling to England. Her mother wrote a text so that once this woman crossed the border, she could read it and call the sister on their behalf.

Another friend was recently accepted into an Italian university. She had no way of contacting the embassy. The embassy eventually called her to say her student visa was ready—a moment she had waited nearly two years for. Now she has no way to buy a ticket or find a place to live in Italy.

I have a friend studying in China. I haven’t spoken to her in almost two weeks. I hope she’s acing her exams and not constantly worrying about her mother or her friends in Iran. Knowing her, I doubt she’s slept much at all.

Most young Iranians are scattered across the world—or desperately trying to leave. Even parents plan escape routes for children who aren’t even teenagers yet. They’d rather their kids live on another continent than next door to them in a homeland that might murder them. Emotion has become a luxury they can’t afford.

Communication inside the country isn’t much better. We couldn’t text one another until the eighth day. The only messages we received during those eight days were threats from the government—labeling protesters as “terrorists” and demonstrations as “riots,” words that conveniently grant them the right to murder civilians. Or at least, that’s what they believe.

Phone calls and messages are monitored, traced, recorded. We can’t freely talk about what’s happening or how we feel. For now, just hearing a friend’s voice—knowing they’re still breathing—is enough.

When we finally found a way back online, photos and videos began resurfacing. We knew the situation was horrific, but I don’t think anyone can comprehend the scale of this crime yet.

There was a twelve-minute video of a father calling his son’s name in a sea of corpses. Every second felt like a lifetime. I tried to count the bodies. It was impossible. What terrified me most was knowing this was just one clip from one city.

Hundreds of young boys and girls lay in body bags, some with their families crying beside them. Guilty of one crime: protesting for their rights. For change. For a future. This isn’t just a loss of life—it’s millions of dreams erased, futures unfinished, love unrealized, work undone. It’s the infinite possibilities of unlived lives. Each of them had a story. None were allowed to finish it.

Protests against the regime began long before I was born. As a teenager, I finally understood what was happening—who people were afraid to criticize out loud. It felt like living in Harry Potter, minus the magic. Except here, love and friendship don’t defeat armed police.

At every protest, I tried to memorize the names of those who were killed. Remembering their names felt like the smallest act of respect. I never met them, but every time I see rock jewelry, I think of Mohammad Hosseini. I can’t hear “Look What You Made Me Do” without thinking of Nika Shahkarami. These aren’t just names—but names are all that remain.

Name after name, I tried to keep up. Now there are too many—many buried anonymously. With no internet, there’s no way to know. Families are threatened. Anyone who manages to access the internet and post photos or videos faces the death penalty.

On January 24th, I had a doctor’s appointment. I saw a father and daughter playing together. I thought of all the children who are gone now—who were once just as small, playing without fear, their parents looking at them with light and love. I thought of what those parents must feel now.

Today is January 25th. I watched the first snowfall with my dad. The neighbors’ children were screaming with joy on their balcony. I couldn’t stop thinking about those who didn’t live to see this winter. My dad said it too: “Poor kids. They never got to see this snow.” Thinking it is one thing. Saying it out loud breaks something inside you. My heart shattered for what feels like the millionth time.

The government doesn’t allow families to hold funerals. Mourning is illegal. Crying is forbidden. So families dress in black and celebrate instead—dancing and clapping through tears. Watching the videos, I found myself smiling and crying at once.

My work depends heavily on the internet, so I haven’t been able to work for three weeks. It’s given me too much time to think. I try to untangle my feelings like a knot that refuses to loosen. I still don’t know what I feel. Rage? Pride? Grief? Guilt? I may never know.

The future feels more uncertain than ever. But one thing is clear: a government that murders and silences its people is a dictatorship. And dictatorships must fall. Blood on the streets cannot be washed away by diplomacy.

The internet may be shut down. Documents may be destroyed. But what Iranians have experienced is real. The Islamic regime is not only a threat to its own people, but to the world. If there’s one thing I can do, it’s to narrate. (Possibly costing my life). If there’s one thing you can do, it’s to refuse ignorance.

بنی‌آدم اعضای یک پیکرند
که در آفرینش ز یک گوهرند
چو عضوی به درد آورد روزگار
دگر عضوها را نماند قرار
تو کز محنت دیگران بی‌غمی
نشاید که نامت نهند آدمی

These were the words that woke sixteen-year-old me before school. Growing up in the Middle East means waking up with your heart already sinking.

Every morning at six, my father turned on the news. We never asked him not to. We knew why. Not because we wanted to know, but because we had to. Years after graduating school, I realized there’s a huge difference between being genuinely interested in politics for the sake of awareness and having to. The first one is a choice, the latter survival – a burden I was assigned to carry before I was even born.

Sometimes the news was unbearable — bodies, bombings, cities on fire. Watching people from my country suffering on TV and feeling powerless and fragile. Every time, I'd think to myself, "we'll never recover from this. How will one be able to live after witnessing such events?"

But the world kept on turning. We'd live another day. We kept going to school, falling in love, celebrating birthdays. The human capacity to live beside horror still amazes me. We’d find our ways into life and love again. Yet it seemed like death, pain and tragedy was always lurking around.

I loved my country long before I learned the word patriot. I loved its language, its poems, its food, its stubborn beauty, its culture, its art, literature. These are what bounds me to this place. Every memory that I've made –from the happiest to the saddest has been because of where I was born. Though I never received that love fully back.

When ISIS attacked my hometown, I was seventeen. I stayed up nights wondering if they would come again. If they did, would it happen while I was at school? Would I get to say goodbye?

As I grew older, I learned to take a step back and fully take a look at my country and its history. It wasn't a pretty picture, I wish I hadn't. The world around us had always been this ugly but I was finally old enough to understand the reason why. It wasn't just the foreigners after our oil, but the government was just as evil. A country that is always under attack does not learn how to be gentle with its own people.

I was nine when I watched Neda die. She was a philosophy student, shot by the police during a protest. I have not forgotten the gaze in her eyes as she's taking her last breaths while the people around her are trying their best to help her. I did not have the language for injustice yet. I only knew that the people meant to protect us were killing a woman, not much older than my favorite aunt, in the street.

Years later, a woman named Vida stood on a box and waved her white headscarf like a flag. She was arrested. Her lawyer was arrested. Even his baby was taken. By then I had learned the rule: in my country, a woman’s visibility is a crime.

My friends and I, only Sixteen year old, started to take off our scarfs while going to school. Exposing our hair to sunlight and wind, a crime that is punished by imprisonment from ten days to two months. The media named us the “Girls of Revolution Street”. We didn’t feel revolutionary. We felt terrified. They called us brave but we felt like hugging death. Now I realize, we sure did. Sixteen is too young to fully understand the consequences.

Boys were allowed to be loud. They rode motorcycles, sang in the streets, went to football stadiums. We watched from behind screens. I loved football so much I started playing futsal at fourteen — even though there were no real fields for women in my city. Eventually girls began disguising themselves as men just to sit in the stands.

One of them was Sahar. When she was caught, she set herself on fire.

The older I got, the less I was allowed to love. Music. Sports. Movement. Even my own hair. Everything I cared about was gendered, regulated, threatened. Love slowly turned into something sharper.

Shushing Iranian women never stopped life. It taught us how to love in silence.

After the pandemic, I was twenty-one and finally going back to university. For the first time in years, I felt excited and even alive.

Then I read the news about a young girl named Mahsa.

And something in the country broke open.

Grief is the never-ending movie in one’s head. It’s a broken CD of favorite memories stuck on loop, playing over and over, while you desperately try to hold on—to the sound of their laugh, to lingering glances, to the slight brush of their skin on yours, to the innocent look on their face while they’re sleeping, and to the conversations never held, all the lines you wish you’d said.

When the wave of grief hits the shores, reminiscing about the past looks a lot like obsessing over a film that was never made. Every memory is a scene; everyone is an Oscar-worthy actor, the final scene cuts too soon, and the leads never get a chance to say goodbye. The protagonist never finds the time to work things out with those they fell out of touch with, and they might not get their happy ending.

I think a huge part of what makes processing the loss of a beloved one so difficult is the nostalgia rather than just their absence. Of course, they seem connected—because why would you feel nostalgic for something you still have access to? It’s the desire for what no longer exists that makes us yearn for our younger selves. Nostalgia is the past that shapes us. It is another version of us, forever frozen in time as the form of a memory—a freeze frame in the middle of the supercut. No wonder it has the power to make us emotional over the most basic things. In an indirect way, it’s us revisiting our younger selves: all the struggles we had to overcome, all the precious moments we experienced from then until now. It’s basically time travel. It’s a rewind button pressed by a familiar sound, a scent, or a face. Nostalgia is one’s shadow, walking alongside us, step by step, always lurking for the right moment to overshadow our whole.

Sorrow always finds me, and when it’s mixed with grief, it tends to romanticize all memories—even the bad ones, the regrets, and the pain. It’s like every shot of our time together is filmed through a soft-focus lens.

After almost a year of carrying this constant feeling of grief and nostalgia in my heart, I’ve come to realize that absence doesn’t have to be a void. Nonexistence doesn’t have to mean lack. Acknowledging that they no longer exist in a physical form can be quite liberating. Knowing I carry his love, his memories, his passion for life—in the form of grief—brings me comfort. I can still talk to him, and he’s still an excellent listener. I still see him everywhere: in everything he once loved, in everything he hated, in all the songs we sang together. He’s still somewhere around.

So no, life doesn’t stop when you lose someone you love—and neither do their lives. They continue to live as long as those who loved them do. Their story threads through ours, still unfolding in the spaces they once filled. That might sound cliché, but there’s logic behind repetitive quotes and clichés: they ring with truth.

Tomorrow, I’m going to see that band you really loved, and I know I’ll have the best time singing and dancing to all those songs we used to sing and dance to. I won’t let myself miss you, and I won’t get upset over the fact that we both planned and saved for this concert—but now I only had to buy one ticket for the both of us. “I know somewhere in the crowd, there’s you.”

The scene fades out, the curtains fall — but you and I remain, behind and together.

Most people will definitely and politely turn such trip down yet these are the very terms we accept when we fall in love. To love any part of the universe, is to love the unknown but it also means that we’re willing to walk into the unknown. What could possibly be more adventurous than love? Man tends to fear the unknown; so why isn’t he running from love rather than diving in it? I think we use the term “falling in love” because nobody intentionally jumps in it.

Love has lingered on human lips for millions of years. Even humanity’s origin story—Adam and Eve—is rooted in love. Ever since the beginning of times, love has been everywhere. Anywhere there’s a proof of life, there was love as well which is ironic since both can’t be seen. What exactly is the nature of love? Why’s it so different than all the other emotions we have? How come it’s always somehow not in line with the brain? These are all questions that man has tried to answer ever since their first encounter with it.

Poets have written poems, sonnets, and dozens of poetry collections yet still have been unsuccessful to find the right words which can vaguely describe the feeling a way that does it justice.

Where ever language fails, art speaks. Painters have painted palaces, walls, and numerous canvases with their colors and tremendous number of techniques and styles hoping to capture only a glimpse of what it feels like to be in love.

Musicians have toned melodies, written lyrics with words that reflected their hearts onto paper, sang, recorded and re-recorded, performing live in front of thousands of other hearts beating together, orchestrated a group of people together and still are nowhere near to a fair explanation to how the heart manages to talk more sense than the brain sometimes.

Filmmakers have spent years in school, creating films using pretty faces, tried their best to capture a raw and pure form of interaction to document love on film. But does it, even the best pictures, come anywhere close to just observing strangers in Pont des Arts in Paris?

I’m only looking at art to find the answers because the scientists gave up a long time ago. The more I think, the more I conclude that maybe the nature of love is to be incomprehensible and mysterious. Maybe love’s nature is to remain incomprehensible. After all, mystery doesn’t only enchant the fool—it humbles the intellect too.