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War and Nachos on My Social Media Feed

Iranian engineers had spent years building it. It was meant to connect Tehran to Karaj, a city where I have relatives and that I visited as a child. The bridge had yet to open to the public. An...

NYTIMES 입력 2026.04.28 00:00 0

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Guest Essay

War and Nachos on My Social Media Feed

April 27, 2026,

11:00 a.m. ET

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Illustration by Shoshana Schultz/The New York Times

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Nick Mafi

is an Iranian-American writer.

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On the first Saturday morning in April I sat on my sofa in Brooklyn, drinking coffee, and watched the B1 bridge outside Tehran partly collapse on my phone. Iranian engineers had spent years building it. It was meant to connect Tehran to Karaj, a city where I have relatives and that I visited as a child. The bridge had yet to open to the public. An American bomb cut it in half while families nearby were celebrating

Sizdah Bedar

, the Persian holiday known as Nature Day. Reports say that at least eight people were killed. An engineer at the site told a French reporter that the bridge had been like a child to him.

Below that video, Instagram showed me an ad for a Dr. Dennis Gross anti-aging face mask. Below that, an old college classmate arranging tulips on her kitchen island. Below that, a nurse at a hospital in Tehran carrying newborns through the debris. Below that, a video of nachos and lobster rolls and everything else someone ordered at Yankee Stadium on opening day.

I kept scrolling. I do not remember making a decision to keep scrolling. I don’t think I made one. My thumb just moved, the way it always moves, down and down, and the war and the face mask and the tulips and the nachos slid past in a single unbroken current, each one dissolving into the next before I could fix my attention on any of them. This was my Instagram feed. Yours would have shown you something else entirely. For me, the food video lasted 30 seconds. The bridge, 11. I obliged.

I called my mother later that morning. The person she asks about most is my cousin in Tehran. On the Persian New Year, on March 20, my cousin and I managed to FaceTime for three minutes before the signal cut out. He told me I looked sharp in my suit. We told each other what we always do. That we love each other, that we miss each other, that we hope to see each other soon. Then the screen went black.

There is a word in Persian, “ghorbat,” that describes the particular ache of exile. It is not homesickness, exactly. It is more structural than that, more permanent. It is the condition of being separated from a place by a distance that you understand, somewhere deep in your body, you may never close.

My parents have lived inside that word for more than 40 years. Their parents died in America, still calling Iran home. Ghorbat runs through Persian poetry the way longing runs through blues music, not as a subject that appears now and then but as the key in which everything is written. Centuries of invasion and exile carved the word into the language. The poetry evolved to hold the things displaced people could not take with them.

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