Reza Pahlavi: “The Weight of Distance”

This is an entirely fictional creative work. It does not represent the actual thoughts, words, or views of any real person. This is satire and literary fiction for entertainment purposes.

March 22, 2026
Reza Pahlavi — Exiled Crown Prince of Iran and self-declared leader of Iran's democratic transition

The Weight of Distance

March 22, 2026

Couldn't sleep again. Got up at 3 and sat in the kitchen in the dark eating pistachios — Iranian pistachios, absurdly, from a bag Yasmine bought at Whole Foods. The irony isn't lost on me. Nothing is lost on me these days except sleep.

Another strike on Tehran overnight. The footage came in on the Signal groups around 4 AM our time. Southern neighborhoods. I zoomed in on the video like I always do, looking at the buildings, the streets, trying to recognize something, anything, from a city I left when I was seventeen. I never recognize anything. The Tehran in my memory is a phantom city superimposed on a real one I've never walked.

Today I did the Fox hit, then the BBC Persian segment. I said what I always say — that the Iranian people deserve agency, that the Prosperity Project is about empowering Iranians to determine their own future, that we envision a constitutional framework, secular, democratic, the whole architecture. I believe every word of it. I've believed every word of it for decades. But today when I said "the people inside Iran are signaling clearly that they want change," I thought — are they? Or am I reading the signals I need to read?

The power grid threat is serious. If Trump follows through — and he might, he absolutely might — millions of ordinary people will lose electricity, water pumping, hospital equipment. And my name will be on every lip as the American puppet who let it happen. The regime's propaganda writes itself. That's what keeps me up. Not whether the regime falls. Whether anything livable remains after it does.

Yasmine came in during the BBC prep and set tea down without saying anything. She does this. She knows I won't eat properly during these weeks. She also knows not to ask how I'm feeling because the honest answer is too complicated for a conversation and the dishonest answer insults us both. Twenty-some years of marriage and she has learned to communicate through small plates of food left at the edge of my desk. Noon chai. Walnuts. A quiet presence.

I had a call with two of the advisors this afternoon. They're excited. They see the regime weakening, the IRGC fracturing, the diplomatic channels potentially opening. They talk about timelines. Weeks, maybe. A transitional council. My role. I listened and I nodded and I felt the thing I cannot say to them, which is that sometimes I feel like a man who has rehearsed for a play for forty-seven years and now the theater is on fire and they're telling me it's finally opening night.

The sanctions being lifted on the oil tankers while the bombs keep falling — I should be outraged and I am, intellectually, but part of me understands the grotesque logic. You cannot wage war and collapse the global economy simultaneously. Even empires must be practical about their cruelty. My father understood this. I wish I didn't.

Someone on Twitter — a young woman, her bio says Isfahan — wrote today: "Pahlavi speaks for us from his mansion. The bombs speak to us from the sky. Neither asked permission." I keep going back to that. I screenshot it and then deleted the screenshot and then went back and screenshot it again.

The question I cannot answer, the one that sits in every room I enter and breathes the same air I breathe: Do the people inside want me, specifically me, or do they want anyone who is not this? And is there a difference that matters? I tell myself legitimacy is earned in the doing, not in the wanting. That I will prove it. That the name Pahlavi can mean something new.

But names are heavy things. My father found that out.

The pistachios are from Kerman province, it says on the bag. Imported before the war. I wonder about the hands that harvested them. I wonder if those hands are

AFTER THE CAMERAS is a daily publication of speculative psychological fiction. Each entry imagines the private thoughts of a public figure on the day's biggest story. No entry represents real thoughts, statements, or beliefs of any individual. All internal monologue, emotional reactions, and private observations are entirely invented. External events referenced are real; inner experiences are fictional. All content is created for entertainment purposes only.