It wasn’t the coffee, I swear. Maybe the music or the barking dog across the street. But everything shrank and I was a little child screaming for a fair division. Screaming for a permission to sing, to be bare, to be fair, to be ...to be!

Whoever is reading this, you don’t need to sympathize with me. You don’t need to think about what made me the little child that I am always going to be. Carefully swinging on a big black tire hanging from a tree, anticipating death or another manifestation of life, I am still screaming, with a closed mouth; my eyes swell up as tears climb my nostrils with every gasp.

Forget about good or bad friends; forget about dishes and digital cameras. I can hear the atmosphere of Iran, I can taste the gasoline-filled air or the breezy hill-tops of Shemran. Yah, all of this Orientalist, mystical, shit, I feel it. You may not understand, so don’t pity the young aspiring writer /journalist in exile. She’ll go back, to finish screaming for a fair division of rights, land, ideas, the good, and the fucking bad.

It wasn’t the coffee. It happened when I realized that people who experienced the pre-revolutionary Iran, are getting older. I realized it’ll get really difficult in 20 years to know the truth about things, no matter how many 9-min clips there are on YouTube. Because now, all the blood that was shed, all the puppets carved out of infected trees, are silently anchored in some forgotten nightmare that no one wants to remember.