Yesterday my sister was arrested. My mother broke the news to me over the phone, her voice trembling.

 One sister already wounded, taken to surgery. Now this one—taken away.

What is happening to our family?

The strange, almost bitter irony is this: I was always the stubborn one, the “revolutionary” of the house, the one who never backed down. And now both my sisters have raced past me.

Still, this arrest tears at me in a way I can’t describe. My sister has asthma. She’s fragile, always has been. Apparently at dusk she went out walking with her friend. Armed security forces blocked their path. Because she didn’t speak with the local accent, because she probably couldn’t—or wouldn’t—hide the disgust burning in her eyes when she looked at them.

I know her. She would never swallow her words in front of those faces. When they stopped the girls and demanded ID cards, neither of them handed anything over. And they were right.

 In moments like that, the only wise thing is to stay calm and give them nothing.

The truth is painfully simple these days: you don’t even need to do anything to be arrested. Just walking down the street at the wrong hour is enough to make you a criminal.

 This is martial law in everything but name—imposed by the Islamic Republic, yet never officially declared.

Thank God my father is a known figure; they didn’t keep the girls long. They only scolded them, told them they are now forbidden to step outside at night without ID. My sister told me she shouted at them: “Since when is walking in the street a crime? What business is it of yours where we walk or how long we stay out? What right do you have?

”See? I knew she couldn’t hold her tongue. Thank heavens it ended there. But I know these people. I know what they’re capable of. I wish she hadn’t given them any excuse. One wrong move and it could have ended in blood.

Since last night heavy rain has been falling. The radio waves are drowning in jamming. I sat for a while trying to catch Radio Farda or BBC again—nothing but static.

I should call my sister now, see how she’s doing. Meanwhile the news keeps pouring in:

• Israel says 1.5 billion dollars left Iran through cryptocurrency and landed in Dubai.
• The U.S. Treasury claims tens of billions more flowed to Europe.
• American forces are quietly pulling out of neighboring countries, moving to safer bases.
• Trump keeps talking, saying things that make the air heavier.
• Iran International is speaking with absolute certainty: an American strike on Iran is coming, they say it’s no longer a question of if.
• The Security Council is holding a session to decide Iran’s fate.

Decide our fate?

They cut our internet, leave us in darkness, and then sit in fancy rooms thousands of miles away to determine what happens to us? Go to hell.

Today I spent the whole day playing mindless games on my phone. I had no strength for anything else. My whole body felt numb, as though something inside me was screaming:

 A great darkness is approaching. The silence after the protests died down, the internet still cut—this can only mean one thing: something terrible is being hidden.

Strangely, part of me no longer wants the internet to come back. Because I know when they finally turn it on again, it will be because they are no longer afraid of what will spread. That means they have already told their own dirty manipulative narrative to the world and probably many had believed it!

 And that means the bad news has already happened. The videos of killings and executions. The bodies left on the ground by this criminal regime in the last few days. The names of the dead—names that will tear open wounds we didn’t know we had.

I don’t want to be hit all at once by that wave. I’m not ready.

(On the anniversary of the Islamic Revolution, internet was fast and open. Yesterday—February 14—it crawled. VPNs barely worked. This child-killing regime deliberately opens the net on days it wants the news to go out, and strangles it on days it wants us blind and deaf.)

I want to say one last thing:

For me, living has always meant two things:

• Feeling joy, tasting life, laughing
• And standing upright, refusing to bend

Now that the first has been stolen from me, the second burns brighter than ever inside my chest. I have no choice left but to hold on to it—with both hands, with everything I have.