We Were Still There

They say history happened to us.As if we were not standing inside it.

I was sixteen when the first foreign soldiers walked past our street. My mother pulled me away from the window, not because she feared them, but because she knew the price of being seen.

At first, people spoke of change. Schools reopened. Posters appeared. We learned new words — democracy, rebuilding, future — words that sounded clean, untouched by dust. I returned to school with a blue backpack and a notebook I kept wrapped in plastic so it wouldn’t tear on the walk home.

But war does not leave just because it changes its language.

Explosions became part of our routine. We learned the distance of sound — close enough to shake the walls, far enough to keep breathing. We learned which streets to avoid, which days to stay inside, which questions not to ask. I memorised my lessons quickly, afraid there would not be time later.

My father said little. Silence became his way of surviving. My mother carried everything else — fear, planning, remembering — in the careful way she folded our clothes each night, as if order itself might protect us.

Years passed. Governments changed. Promises expired.

By the time I reached university, I understood that progress here was never straight. It curved, stalled, reversed. Still, I studied. Literature. Words were the only place where I felt unoccupied.

Then 2021 came.

I remember the sound of helicopters, the panic that moved faster than any announcement. I remember packing nothing because there was nothing that could be carried that mattered more than staying alive. I remember the streets filled with people who had believed, just long enough, that belief itself might save them.

After, everything shrank.

Our world became smaller — rooms, rules, permissions. My university closed its doors to me. They said it was temporary. Temporariness has a way of settling into permanence here.

People abroad asked how we felt. They wanted grief, rage, despair — emotions that could be consumed quickly. I had none of those in neat form. What I had was something heavier: continuity.

Because even after everything, we were still there.

I still woke early. I still read, quietly. I still helped my mother cook, still listened to my younger cousins whisper about dreams they were learning to hide. Life did not stop. It narrowed. It bent. It endured.

The world talks about Afghan women as if we disappeared overnight. As if we are frozen in time, waiting to be saved or mourned.

But we are here — negotiating survival daily, adapting in ways that never make headlines. Resistance does not always look like shouting. Sometimes it looks like remembering who you are when every system tells you to forget.

I do not know what the future holds. Certainty has never been our privilege.

But I know this:

We were not passive recipients of history.

We were witnesses.

We were participants.

And we are still here.

By Zhazia Muradi

Image copyright © REUTERS