Home may be perilous and the destination out of reachBut there are no paths without an end, do not grieve— HafizMy cousin’s message arrived on January 21 at 8:39 p.m. After the January massacres in Iran. Before the war and its precarious ceasefire.She wrote to me on WhatsApp:I don’t see you and others who share your views against the war as human beings. Their hands are also bloody. I have nothing more to say to someone like you. This is long past the point of dialogue. Tomorrow in a free Iran, with the leadership of Reza Pahlavi, I hope no traitor like you ever steps in.Leila is twenty-eight, three years younger than me. (Her name has been changed to protect her privacy.) She grew up in Iran (though she no longer lives there), and I grew up in the United States. And yet despite the distance, we always seemed to agree that boys were not worth our time, that we would never be too old for bastani aroosaki (chocolate and vanilla ice cream fashioned into a face on a stick, mostly given to children), and that the Iranian people have been righteously fighting for liberation, caught between domestic repression and foreign intervention. I spent many mornings waking up in her family’s house in Karaj to the sound of morning doves, the muted clatter of my aunt washing dishes in the kitchen, and, when we were both much younger, the sound of Leila and her younger sister pacing and giggling behind my door, waiting for me to wake up from my jet lag–induced sleep so we could play together.During my last visit to Iran, in 2022, I was called in for interrogation. The state had decided my political speech made me dangerous, or at least unwelcome. I realized this would be my last trip home, as returning to Iran again could result in imprisonment, or worse. On the last night of my last visit, Leila and I wept on her bright purple couch, which somehow matched the light pink Persian carpet underneath. Neither we nor a room so bright were prepared for such grief.Now we were…
