A Bag of Broken Tiles: Report from Tehran

WHEN THE WAR BEGAN, I WAS ASLEEP.

I had decided not to leave the house that morning—despite having a meeting scheduled with someone I couldn't afford to disappoint. I told myself it was anxiety. I went back to sleep. When I woke up, my phone was flooded with messages—from inside and outside Iran. The war had already started. For a moment, my first thought was not fear but something strangely ordinary: What will he think of me if I don't show up?

Only later did I learn that explosions had occurred near a group of my friends. They had dropped to the floor during the blasts and then gathered outside, shaken but unharmed.

In the hours that followed, the internet began to disappear. One VPN after another failed, as if exits were being quietly sealed. I had prepared for disconnection but not for the feeling that came with it: as if I were trapped in a room filling slowly with water, rising toward my face. In the first days, we were not yet used to the sound of explosions. With each blast, we would jump out of our places. We taped the windows, tied the cabinet doors shut, and with every explosion we took shelter behind what felt like the relatively safe walls of the house.

I had read somewhere that we should keep our mouths slightly open during a blast so our eardrums wouldn't rupture. My sister had read that we should hold a pillow behind our necks to protect our spines from possible shrapnel. I had imagined it many times—silently thinking about the fragment that, after the explosions, might come to end everything for us.

Some of the blasts were so strong that the walls trembled, as if the house itself might come undone. We gathered in the center of the home—my parents, my sister, our cat—trying to stay away from the windows in case the glass shattered. And yet, our family, too, was coming apart. Disagreements kept surfacing: One insisted we should keep our phones and laptops charged; another was angry that we hadn't bought enough bottled water, worried our food supplies m