I know I sound like a broken record, but just so you know: the internet is still completely cut off.
Another full day has slipped away in this suffocating silence. I run an online shop, so my entire livelihood has ground to a halt. I try to fill the hours with exercise or cleaning the house, but something inside me has gone numb. My whole body feels frozen, paralyzed. Nothing stirs my heart anymore; no task feels worth the effort. I’m drowning—utterly, endlessly drowning—in worry and confusion amid this digital void.
Guess what arrived today? The damn telecom bill for the internet. Seriously? They expect me to pay for something that doesn't even exist anymore?
The not-knowing is driving me mad. I've gone to a friend's house a few times to catch scraps of news through their satellite dish, but it's never enough. When I call friends, either they don't pick up, or fear chokes their voices—they barely say anything real over the phone.
Rumors pass mouth to mouth like whispers in the dark, and the deepest fear everyone shares is the staggering number of dead in cities across the country. Nothing solid, nothing confirmed—just fragments that tear at your soul. We who are still breathing are the only living witnesses left.
But with no internet, there's no way to share the videos, the names, the proof.
From the protests of past years, we know exactly what this blackout means: they shut down the world so they can slaughter the young in the streets without anyone seeing.
Yesterday, talking to my sister, she said something that chilled me to the bone. She'd heard about a teenage boy who bent down to pick up a tear-gas canister from the ground—to throw it back at the forces—and a sniper shot him dead on the spot. I refused to believe it at first. How could a sniper aim at a child like that?
How is this even possible? The horror is beyond words now. And here I am, crazy enough—or maybe just reckless enough—to talk openly about it with my sister over the phone, as if we've both become fearless in the face of it all. Or perhaps we've just stopped caring what happens next.
According to her, in their city and the surrounding towns, the death toll has been devastating. A relative works in a hospital there, and every so often word leaks out: hundreds of bodies brought to the morgue. Hundreds.
Doctors aren't allowed to report the real numbers officially. Most of these deaths will probably be logged as "natural causes" or "accidents."
Families are threatened—if they don't stay silent, they won't get the bodies back. Worse: other family members could be arrested or killed too. Intimidating grieving families isn't new; it's routine. Of course, all of this is just my guesswork. I have no hard proof right now. But we've lived through this playbook for years under the Islamic Republic.
They kill people in the streets, muzzle domestic media, force families to say on state TV that their child died "defending the revolution"—or else they'll come for the siblings next. We've seen it all before. We've survived it all before.
With the internet gone, we can't even expose these filthy tactics anymore. We're cut off from the entire world… completely isolated.
God, please—those of you who still have internet: cherish it.
Never take it for granted.
It isn't just a luxury; right now,
it's the thin line between truth and total darkness.
