Kan🩰

This is a space for soft unravelings where feelings stretch out on the floor like sunbeams, and words spill without asking to be perfect. Expect poetry that doesn't rhyme, literary ramblings, healing in half-sentences, and little fragments of me tucked in my art and sketches

But I think I’ll just go fall in love with someone anyway.

There is a country where the sky feels closer than justice. Where being born a woman is not a life, but a sentence. They are told their place is behind the curtain, behind the veil, behind the door, behind the man. That the face God shaped in divine detail must be hidden not just from desire, but from daylight. It is not modesty they are taught. It is erasure.

Even a brief glance at a man who wasn’t her husband or blood relative could be twisted into an accusation. As if a look could undo morality. As if the very existence of a woman was always one step away from sin.

The new law made it clear: women were not to speak in public, not to men, not to strangers, not to shopkeepers, not to doctors, not even to the wind. Even within their homes, they were warned to be cautious because if someone passing by heard a woman singing or laughing or even raising her voice, the consequences would come quickly and without mercy. The rules were simple, brutal, and always shifting. Cloaked in the guise of religion, twisted by men who fear what a woman might become if she knew her own power.

Women were not allowed in school past the sixth grade. As if learning multiplication or grammar was dangerous. As if a girl understanding her own mind could somehow bring down a government. They said it was about preserving modesty. But there was no modesty in what they did to women. No dignity in hiding them like contraband, like something shameful. And yet the world called it culture. Called it tradition. Called it sacred. But it wasn’t any of it. It was control.

And when women dared to speak up, when they demanded rights, safety, education, a chance to breathe, people rolled their eyes. “Feminism,” they scoffed. “A Western agenda too radical.”

But how was it an agenda to ask for basic humanity? To want to read? To want to sing in your own kitchen without fear? To want your daughter to grow up free, not buried alive under cloth and silence? What is extreme about showing your face under the sun? What is rebellious about wanting not to die in childbirth because a hospital wouldn’t admit you without a male chaperone?

This is not some glamorous movement dipped in hashtags and soundbites. This is a plea for basic human rights, to breathe, to speak, to exist fully, to be a person and not just a possession.

Feminism, in its rawest form, is not a war cry. It is a whisper between silenced lips: “I deserve to live. I deserve to choose. I am not less.”

To be an Afghan woman today is to be a ghost that bleeds, a flower that is forbidden to bloom. And yet, like seeds in the cracks of concrete, some still dare to rise. They teach in secret. They write under pen names. They look at the sky and dream of a world that sees them.

Let the world stop calling this an agenda.

It’s not activism.

It’s not politics.

It’s survival.

It’s truth.

It’s freedom.