Why must one write!

For four years now, Herat has been wrapped in a heavy shroud of shadows—shadows that arrive not with the clamor of war, but like night quietly seeping into the fabric of our days. Here, the earth has been scorched dry by the ashes of the sun, and every breath has slowed to the faintest rhythm of survival; a place where pain is not a blade upon the body, but a dagger buried deep in breathless silence.

In the alleys of this ancient city, where the flag of withered memories trembles against the walls, I stand with eyes that, in every blink, witness the wounds of our history. The empty streets are verses of muted remembrance; silence tangled with the echoes of footsteps no one hears anymore. Children no longer play, no longer laugh—only shadows drifting through an unarrived spring, waiting for a summer that may never come.

I saw a girl in a courtyard strewn with dry leaves. Her gaze was caught in the frame of a broken window—eyes that tried to pierce the past and search the future, yet both were barred by towering walls of silence. Her trembling, wounded hands seemed to write her very soul upon the page; a story of unheard voices and abandoned dreams. Those brittle leaves were the half-written notebooks of a generation.

And here, in the heart of this city, resistance is not defined by loud voices, but by writing—emerging from breaths pressed heavily against the walls of time. My resistance is the unseen shattering of chains wound tightly around the human body; an invisibility that spills daily from our eyes and slips quietly into forgotten corners.

I write not with melody or song, but with the muted pulse of hearts that never forget. My writing springs from wounds that bear no color of blood, yet are harder than the coldest iron; wounds that neither heal nor fade into oblivion.

This is not a tale of war and sword, but of soil ground daily beneath suffocated breaths; a chronicle of hidden fire burning within empty streets, beside shuttered windows; a light that, even in the darkest night, waits for a dawn that might rise from the heart of suffering.

My resistance is not of axe or dominion, but of a wound that slowly blossoms; a flame glowing deep within shadows; words that, though whispered in silence, are renewed a thousand times over; a tree which, though its branches are broken, still roots itself in the soil and still draws life into its veins.

Fatemeh Erfan