Days have passed since the internet went dark. I don’t even have the energy left to count how many.
To anyone sitting comfortably far away, unable to imagine how terrifying a total internet blackout can be: I dare you—turn yours off, along with every single connected thing in your life, just for a few hours.
Then you’ll understand how quickly you fall behind the world. Work… daily routines… staying connected to the people you love… everything vanishes.
It is really unsettling, especially when you have no idea when it comes back or even it is going to be connected at all.
Instead of showing the end of the world with zombie hordes, they should film an apocalypse where the internet simply stops existing.
One word: Horrifying.
And here I am, powerless except to sit behind this monitor and type. Grammarly has abandoned me too—no more fixing my typos, no more AI polishing the sentences I struggle to write
…Continuation of that cursed night…
Every alley I turn into, small scattered groups of people are hurrying toward the main street. But the sheer number of armed forces makes approaching foolish. They look like they’ve been ordered to full readiness tonight—as if they came prepared to drown everything in blood.
I tell myself maybe I can slip through the back of the small Bazaar and reach the protesters on the main avenue. I’m sure I’ll find at least a small crowd there to join. So I take a narrow, pitch-black passage behind the market. The closer I get to the main street, the stranger it feels. The avenue is blindingly bright—and completely empty.
A sick, choking dread squeezes my throat. Shops are shuttered, yet the entire length of the street is lit up like daylight. Not a single movement. Something is terribly wrong. I rip the mask off my face and stuff it into my pocket. I pull my headscarf tightly around my head, arranging it the way devout women do, and force myself to step onto the main street.
Suddenly dozens of fully armed soldiers in identical uniforms rise in front of me like a wall. I’m fairly tall, but these men—with their towering height and bulky gear—are terrifying. One glance tells me they own the entire avenue. And I have walked straight into the heart of the suppression force. Their ugly laughter chills me, but I refuse to break.
In an instant I play the fool, adopting the most pitiful, frightened expression I can manage, and blurt out: “Oh my God! What happened? Did Israel attack?!”
The forces, already tensing to grab me, freeze. From a distance their officer shouts: “Hold!”,
“Sister! Get out of here! It’s not safe! Leave immediately!”
I, who fooled him with my Islamist feature, seize the opportunity, run toward the side street opposite, heart hammering.
From afar I hear them open fire on the few remaining protesters. Gunshots crack through the night, followed by distant screams. I reach the coastal road, now swallowed in darkness.
Later a friend who owns a shop on that street told me: before sunset, forces stormed the market and forced every shopkeeper to close so they could take full control of the area before the march even began.
As I walk home through the painful silence of the night, I see myself from above—restless, lost, furious. I watch my own body walking, soul hanging by a thread.
My sister called in the middle of the night. I told her I couldn’t join the protest and she shouldn’t worry.
She answered: “Thank God! I’ve been fasting and praying for three days straight that you’d come home safe. It was a terrifying night. I’ll tell you everything later.”
I, who haven’t believed in anything for years, smiled a little at her words—and strangely, they gave me a tiny spark of strength.
That brutally long and freezing night, blaming myself for staying away from the people who stood beside me in spirit, I finally laid my head on the pillow. So many lost their lives that night and flew away. Perhaps that’s why—without even knowing it—I didn’t sleep until dawn.
The night drags on, flames licking at its edges, and the internet is still dead. The next day my sister told me over the phone about the death march that took place in their city, about the people who lost their lives, about her daughter…
To be continued …
(The internet is back now, speeds are much better, but for some reason Publisha0x ’s page is still harder to reach than others. I think it’s because we inside Iran have to use VPNs, and this page reacts more aggressively to VPN traffic than most others do. I’m usually active on other pages, but the people here have always been kind to me, so I’ve decided to stay—like I have for the past few years. I know my words are bitter and my writing isn’t comforting. I’m just telling the truth. I can’t reply to comments anymore because the connection dies every time I try. So I leave the answering to my compatriots abroad who have rolled up their sleeves these days and are fighting hard for our homeland’s freedom. This is a war we’ve been waging against this child-killing, bloodthirsty regime for over forty years—and personally, for twenty of them.)
We will win.
No matter what it takes, we will win.
Dead or alive… we will win.
And we will show the world exactly how humanity was butchered in the streets of Iran—and how the nightmare still walks among us.
