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Report from Tehran, written from April 18 to April 25
Tehran does not look like the city I once knew.
It looks like a city under occupation.
17 days after the ceasefire, the mood is not simple hope or simple despair. It is confusion, distrust, exhaustion, and a silence full of questions no one can answer.
The subway is free now, apparently. A cheap little bribe from the same terrorist Islamic Regime occupying Iran that spills our blood, breaks our economy, cuts our internet, then throws crumbs at us as if a free ticket can buy forgiveness.
And of course, even the free subway is late.
That is their whole empire in one image:
ruin your life,
offer you a discount,
fail to deliver that too.
The streets are not alive the way they should be. People move because they have to, not because the city calls them out. Public life has become functional, not social. Daytime is for errands, clinics, work, survival. Night belongs more and more to fear, checkpoints, and the regime’s staged little circuses.
You see fewer faces buried in phones now, because what is there to check when the regime has strangled the internet for weeks? Instead, almost everyone wears headphones, as if the whole city is trying to shut reality out before it crushes them.
Because the thought is unbearable:
that after all this blood,
after January,
after the arrests,
after the torture,
after the gallows,
this mafia might still survive.
Every major intersection, every square, every main four way carries the same sickness. Men in green and black, guns and batons in hand, military vehicles behind them, walking over our streets like they conquered a foreign land.
For one second, you feel like you have been dropped into a Metal Gear game.
Then you remember:
no, this is my city.
Do you know what it feels like to be a third rate citizen in your own homeland?
It has nothing to do with success, education, money, or work. Under this occupation, if you are not part of the mafia, you are disposable. Everything you have can be taken from you. Your job. Your home. Your phone. Your name. Your loved ones. Your life.
So you learn to walk carefully in the city where you were born.
I played in these streets.
I made friends here.
I rode my bike through half of this city.
I know Tehran like the back of my own hand.
I found love and got my heart broken in these streets.
I went on dates in cafés all over this city.
I worked in some of them too.
I have been part of the startup system of this city.
I have been to most of the bookstores.
I know these people. And do you want to know the interesting part?
We all feel it.
Being a Tehran kid is like being a New Yorker. It is more than an address. It is a rhythm, a wound, a language, a map written under your skin.
And now I have to move through it like a spy.
In my own city.
In my own homeland.
I have two phones, because one has to stay clean for the street. If they stop me and search the wrong one, I am not the only one who pays. My loved ones pay too.
That is what life becomes under a regime that treats truth like contraband.
The information space is broken beyond words. Rumors move faster than facts. Verification feels almost impossible. Trust in official sources is dead, and even unofficial news arrives wounded by blackout, fear, and delay.
People are not only uncertain.
They are trapped inside uncertainty.
English
