The Wound of 15 August: “I Left Kabul in Tears”

Sent to Zan TV

Author: Farahnaz Froogh | Journalist

I was a journalist. I lived through words and used my camera and pen to tell the stories of my people’s pain. But a day came when I became one of those people whose pain I was supposed to write about.

The day Kabul fell, it felt as though I had lost more than a city. I lost my home, my streets, my friends, my memories and the sense of peace I thought I would always have. I left Kabul with tears in my eyes.

When I separated from my family, I did not know whether this goodbye would last a few days, a few months, or perhaps forever.

The sounds of those days are still alive in my mind, the sound of people crying, the sound of anxiety, the sound of footsteps that did not know where they were going.

I was among that crowd too, a journalist who had spent years telling the stories of other people’s pain, but that day could not find any words to describe her own.

It was extremely difficult and painful. Even more painful was that I had lost my sister in an explosion in Kabul’s sixth police district. Carrying her memories with me was very difficult.

It is still hard for me to believe that the girl who once lived with us at home, laughed, spoke and was part of our lives is now present only in my memories.

I was not able to hold her one last time. I could not tell her how much I loved her.

Perhaps that is the most painful part of it all. War does not only kill people. Sometimes it also takes away a family’s chance to say goodbye.

Now I am living in exile, while my sister rests beneath the soil of my homeland.

Sometimes I think about where she would be today if that explosion had not happened. What would she be doing? Would her voice still fill the house? Would we still talk together about life and the future?

None of these questions has an answer.

That day, I understood that some kinds of pain cannot be told through words alone.

I lost my sister, left my homeland and now live in exile, carrying memories that have each taken a part of my heart with them.

Sometimes people think I have been saved because I escaped the war and insecurity. But no one asks what I carried with me when I left.

I left Kabul, but Kabul never left me.

Every night, a part of that city comes into my dreams, a street I used to walk through, the familiar voices of my family, the faces of my friends and the home that now exists only in my memories.

Exile is not only about being far from a homeland. Sometimes it means waking up every morning and realising that the life you once knew no longer exists.

I am still the same journalist, but this time the story I want to tell is my own.

The story of a woman who lost her home.

The story of a family separated from one another.

The story of a generation forced to leave behind a world of memories with only a small suitcase.

Sometimes I want to return to Kabul, not because I want to change the past, but simply to sit with my family once again and feel that there is still somewhere in this world where I belong.

I left Kabul in tears...

But I still hope that one day I will be able to remember Kabul without tears.

Until that day, I live with my memories, write through my longing and try to survive. Perhaps one day my pen, instead of telling stories of collapse and escape, will write about return, peace and being reunited with family.