Fighter Jets

I wholeheartedly thought I would be dead if it got to this point. I thought that my heart would crumble, my bones break, and my head explode if I were to one day watch smoke and flames over Tehran’s sky and have a ticking timer for when US troops would enter Iran on foot. Yet, here I am, alive, and ‘well’, by most metrics.

Almost four years ago, when It had been less than a month since I had arrived in the United States, I watched bloodshed erupt in the streets where I one day walked. As I went to class in a crop top and shorts, I saw young women get beaten to death in my country. I felt pain, homesickness, anxiety, but guilt, and perhaps shame, was the predominant feeling. Guilt of being free, or ‘surviving’, as one might say, and an even deeper shame for continuing to live. Shame for not falling on the ground with every bullet that was fired. Shame for falling out of love, falling in love, making friends, and losing friends all while my people were bleeding.

Almost three years later, I was in my new apartment in NoHo, starting the new job that I had dreamt of for months. I was partying with my friends in New York, sipping wine in the West Village happy hours, and even eating caviar and a fancy cocktail on the rooftop of the Ritz with a view of the Empire State, and my people were having missiles rained on them. That moment, the exact moment of taking my phone out, in complete vain, to take a picture of the Empire State, I felt like I deserved to die. Not for surviving, not for being part of the machine that was bombing my home, but for doing all of that so shamelessly, for being able to sleep at night, for my biggest anxiety at the end of the day being my visa status and my end of summer Europe trip. I felt shame for feeling sadness about the very fact that the war making me sad during the supposed ‘golden days’ of my life.

Once again, six months later, I am sitting here, feeling nothing but pure shame. Shame for the preoccupations that I have, shame for worrying more about my own future than the future of eighty-million Iranians. Shame for seeing the collapsed bridge and an hour later admiring Boston’s Zakim bridge. Shame for hearing a helicopter, and not a fighter jet.

And sometimes, when I sleep at night, I wish I was under fighter jets. Not as a performative form of sympathy, but because it can make me feel, maybe then the shame and the guilt would finally let go, even for a bit.