چو عضوی به درد آورد روزگار

by Mahdokht

23! I blow out the sparkly candles in front of me with hesitance, reluctant to make a birthday wish. My mind drifts off, remembering the kids and teenagers that have been killed over the past year; I feel guilty to have made it longer than them. Zhina (Mahsa) will never be 23. She’ll forever be the 22-year-old girl that took her last breath a mere few days before her birthday.

A lot of them were much younger than me. Born in 2006, just like my little cousin. I remember holding him when he was a little baby, playing with him, and trying to make him laugh. Sarina was a baby then too? Now, she’s gone, leaving her seat in class next to her friend empty.

I try to think back to when I was 16. I try to put myself in her shoes, imagining what I would’ve done. Why did I have the experience of an average 16 year old and she didn’t? My teenage years were filled with the anxiety of what my future held for me. I think Nika was having the same thoughts. Every teenager does, right? Wondering what she would be doing, where she would be going to school, or who she would be living with; except that her worry was significantly exacerbated due to what was going on around her, urging her to take action for the sake of the future of herself and those around her. Now, none of those concerns are relevant anymore; there will be no college, no major, no dorm, and no roommate.

I didn’t know Nika or Sarina and yet they seemed so familiar. I feel like I’ve seen them in the people I went to school with, in my friends, and even at times, in myself. Sarina was a great student. She liked posting vlogs of herself on YouTube dancing, making pizza at home, and doing her make up despite saying that she doesn’t know how to. Nika was artsy. She had good style and worked at a cafe as a barista. She sang to her friends and asked them not to make fun of her singing. I hear her voice in my head, in between the sound of her laughs: “ye del mige beram beram…”. The image of her singing morphs into another image in my head; this time of her hiding behind a car from the police, scared, asking the driver not to move the car.

I saw a video of a schoolyard getting tear-gassed. The place looked very familiar, very much like my high school. The caption of the video turned my doubt into certainty. I remember sitting right in that location studying before the final exams with my friends, playing volleyball during PE, and taking pictures together at the end of the school year. All those memories replay in my head, this time differently. All of the happy memories get tainted by the current state of our school, this time it’s us getting tear-gassed and screaming in pain. I start to repaint all the memories that have happened there, all of them ending with tear gas, screams, and terror.

It’s strange to think about what places have been through; the streets that we walk on, the coffee shops that we visit regularly, or the school that we go to. What’s happened in those locations in the past, what is going to happen there in the future? Between the forgotten past and the undetermined future, we’re here in this negligible interval of time, filled with oblivion. The streets that I spent so much time on growing up had witnessed the student protests of 1999 before I was born and the Mahsa Amini protests after I had left.

We’ve had many political upheavals throughout the past decades, the Mahsa Amini protests being the most recent one. I was too young to fully grasp what was going on during the 2009 protests and I didn’t get to know too much about Bloody Aban due to the internet blackout. The one that changed everything for me and left me devastated was flight 752 being shot down, killing 176 people.

When I heard the news about flight 752, my first instinct was to go on Twitter to see what people were talking about; a rather unhealthy habit I have developed ever since I moved to the US to gauge the gravity of anything that happens in Iran. One of the first things I saw was a tweet going viral, this guy saying goodbye as he was leaving for his flight to Canada. Pause. I went to the comment section to see if he was… I go through the list of the passengers’ names. I don’t see his first name, Soroush, anywhere. I feel relieved. I go through all the comments that were begging God that he wasn’t on that plane, I’m doing the same in my head. Then, I stop at a comment, stating how he had a different legal name and how that name is indeed on the list. But…this can’t be. Oh God. His comment section floods with a new wave of comments: may he Rest In Peace!

There were 176 people on that plane. If it wasn’t Soroush, it would’ve been someone else. That number would never change and yet, everyone who just happened to see that tweet didn’t want it to be him. They didn’t know him, many saw him for the first time through that last tweet but everyone wanted it to be someone else. The thought of it being someone we encounter is just terrifying. Death feels so close that way. He sounded like so many of us and because of that, it terrified everyone that he was on that plane. We don’t want to feel close to tragedies. We like to think that we are far far away from things of this sort happening to us and we don’t even want to entertain the possibility.

I kept scrolling and scrolling. A wedding picture made me stop. At first, I didn’t make any connection between the flight and the smiling faces in the picture, but... They both went to the university that my cousin goes to and the girl, Pouneh, went to my high school. I picture her sitting on the same chairs, taking notes from the same blackboards, and walking down the same stairs with her friends when the bell rings. I go on Instagram and see one of my former teachers mourning her passing. She used to teach her too. I look at her husband, Arash’s Instagram bio: “choose your last words / this is the last time / cause you and I, we were born to die.” and they did, probably holding hands only three days after celebrating their wedding with their families and friends—even before getting to see their wedding pictures. One day after saying their goodbyes before leaving for Canada and going back to school for the new semester. Their Instagram stories are still up, pictures of them hanging out with their friends less than 24 hours ago.

Pouneh’s death was something that left me shaken for weeks. I felt it in my bones. I felt like my classmate had died. I felt like my friend had died. I felt like I had died. We have weak ties with more people than we think. When something terrible happens to the people that we have any kind of connection with, even if it is miniscule, it feels all the more unjustified. We think to ourselves that that could’ve been us, we wonder why that wasn’t us, and we feel guilty that it wasn’t us. Social media is often criticized for setting up unrealistic expectations and creating a fantasy world, but what’s never talked about is how it pulls us out of the fantasy worlds that we have created for ourselves. Every day on social media, we see all these numbers, hundreds of thousands, millions, liking a post, tagging a friend, and they just look like numbers to us. We never think of them as being the same people that have terrible things happening to them on the news. In our minds, there’s two completely separate and distinguishable worlds for things that we don’t like to be a part of our lives and everything else. One of these worlds is for us, social media with its glamorous lifestyles are a part of this world; the one that we like to be a part of, that our families and friends are a part of. Conversely, there’s the world of war, crime, and death. That is not us, that will never be us.

And then things like this happen, clashing the two worlds together, showing us the intersection between the two, the middle part in the Venn diagram is much bigger than we’d like to think. □