War, in the South of My Head

The Return of Pain

These days, my Migraine headaches have returned—the same pains that were an agonizing (and warning) part of my life for years, then gradually disappeared after I emerged from an extremely critical period, when I came out of severe physical shock in a concrete bunker. They had been gone for so long that it seemed my body had finally distanced itself from the past. Today, with the return of the pain, I realize that the distance was not as secure as I had imagined.

I cannot separate the timing of the headaches’ return from the atmosphere in my country and the world these days. The massacre of December 2026–January 2027 and the outbreak of war in Iran formed two event horizons. We knew with certainty that everything would be different from then on. Yet there is a strange resemblance running through all these events. It takes me back to the atmosphere of years when life still went on amid survival, anxiety, conspiracy, torture, hunger strikes, and late-night reading. Those years have remained alive within me—and, as it happens, within my body. These days, they reveal themselves through my body even before I remember them.

When the Body Remembers

Memory does not always return as an image or a narrative. Sometimes it manifests as tension, insomnia, fatigue, or chronic pain. For me, the return of Migraine and other pains that may not be significant is the embodied language of a condition I still cannot fully explain in words. It is as though the body, ahead of my busy, scattered, unfocused mind, has recognized that familiar signs have reappeared in the environment: insecurity, waiting, incomplete news, and the feeling of being suspended between what may happen and what has already happened—the sense that everything and everyone is temporary.

I do not want to establish a definitive relationship among war, memories of the past, and the headaches. For now, this connection is my interpretation of lived experience, not a medical diagnosis.

What I know with certainty for now is that the pain has returned and, at the same time, the past has drawn much closer to me. War has altered my body’s relationship with time. War has intensified in the south of my head, warning me that emerging from a crisis does not necessarily mean that all its effects have ended.