It Feels Like a Movie. It's My Family.

My mother brought my sister and me to Canada in 1995. She got us out — that was the whole project of her life, the thing she spent herself on. She died in 2006 and never had to watch what is happening now. I don't know if that's a mercy or just one more loss. Some nights I'm glad she isn't here to see it. Some nights I would give almost anything to hear what she'd say.

Because I genuinely don't know how I'm supposed to feel. And I've stopped pretending I do.

A war is happening in the country I come from. The regime that has been killing its own people for years might finally be ending, and a part of me — a part I don't fully know what to do with — is something like hopeful. Maybe this is the thing that cracks it open. Maybe there's light on the other side of this for the people still there. And then, in the same minute, the other truth lands: people are dying. Ordinary people, the kind my family is, the kind I would have been. Both of these are real at once and they do not cancel each other out. They just sit in my chest together, refusing to resolve.

Both of these are real at once, and they do not cancel each other out. They just sit in my chest together, refusing to resolve.

For weeks, the only fixed point was my dad. He was still there. About once every three weeks I'd hear from him, and that small contact — just knowing he was alive enough to reach me — would loosen something in my body for a day or two before the dread crept back in. I learned that a neighbor's house was hit with the family inside it. I don't have words for that one. I keep not having words for it. It is the kind of fact the mind refuses to fully let in, because letting it all the way in would be unsurvivable.

So I do something I'm not proud of: I look away. I avoid the news, avoid the subject, change the channel inside my own head, because if I let it run unchecked it takes me down and I cannot afford to go down — I have a baby, a husband, a life that needs me functional. And then, of course, I feel guilty for protecting myself. Guilty for the relief of not-thinking-about-it. As if turning away for an afternoon is a kind of abandonment. It isn't. I know it isn't. I still feel it.

Here is the one I've told almost no one: I think about the house. The house I inherited when my mom died, the one still standing — or maybe not still standing — in Iran. In the middle of all of this, my mind goes to the house, and then I'm flooded with shame for thinking about property while people are being killed. But I've started to forgive myself for it. The house isn't really about property. It's the last physical thing my mother left me. It's a door in a country I was taken out of. Of course I think about it. Thinking about the house is just another way of thinking about her, and about home, and about whether there will be anything left to go back to.

My dad has gotten out now. He's staying with me, here, in Canada. Having him under my roof has loosened the worst of the fear — I can see him, I can feed him, I don't have to count the weeks until the next message anymore. And still none of it feels real. It's like watching a film: the footage, the maps, the names of cities I know in my mouth like old songs. I sit on my couch and watch it the way you'd watch a disaster movie, with that strange flat distance — and then it hits me again that the cast is my whole family. My actual family. This is not a movie. There is no point where the lights come up and everyone walks out fine.

I'm writing this because I can't keep all of it inside, and because I suspect I'm not the only one living in this exact contradiction — safe in a quiet country, sick with a war you escaped, ashamed of your own relief, hopeful and heartbroken in the same heartbeat, unsure you're even entitled to any of these feelings because you're not the one under the sky where things are falling.

If that's you too: I don't think there's a correct way to feel about watching your homeland burn from a warm living room half a world away. I've stopped looking for one. The confusion isn't a failure of feeling — it's what it actually feels like when hope and grief and guilt and relief all arrive at once and none of them will leave.

What I have decided is this: I'll keep my dad close. I'll keep loving the ones I can still reach. I'll let myself look away when I need to, and look back when I can. And I'll keep telling the truth about it — including the messy, unflattering, contradictory parts — because the truth is the one thing about this that's still entirely mine.

I don't know how it ends. I only know who I'm watching it with now: my father, beside me, safe, while we both stare at the country that made us, and try to understand what we're feeling.

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