If in these days you feel your throat constantly burning, if tears are always waiting behind your eyes to fall,
know that you are not alone.

In this time, many efforts are under way to create ambiguity: ambiguity around numbers, narratives and reports.

But what can never be made ambiguous is the grief and pain of these people’s loss, and the wound to human dignity and honour that has settled upon the soul of every Iranian.

They may manipulate numbers, distort narratives and hide lives beneath the earth, but even if they conceal and obscure everything, we still possess the capacity not to allow grief itself to become ambiguous.

We will not make the language of narrative and the demand for justice ambiguous. Nor will we surrender the clear language of truth to ambiguity.

We come from a time when darkness did not mean merely a lamp going out or the internet being cut.
Darkness is where power grips truth by the throat and prevents it from breathing.

But truth does not disappear even if it is silenced for a time.
It passes beneath the people’s skin; it becomes my sleeplessness, your lump in the throat, and our collective memory.

Sometimes truth reveals itself in the sudden kindness of strangers in the street, and sometimes in the moment when one person begins to cry in the middle of the street and suddenly everyone’s eyes fill with tears.
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