Necessary Tension
Luna Tian
On diaspora, farewell, and the irreversible.
For my colleagues and friends from Iran, and for myself. I hope you like it.
Observation is what causes a quantum system to collapse.
The system holds all its possibilities before the observer arrives.— Annotation in Introduction to Quantum Mechanics, p. 88. Author unknown.
I. Superposition
London, Lunar House. 9:17 a.m.
The waiting number is A-114.
Narges stares at the slip of paper in her hands—folding it, unfolding it, unfolding it, folding it again. Her phone screen lights up, goes dark, goes dark, lights up. A friend has sent a message wishing her well. She thinks about it for a moment, and doesn’t reply.
She feels she ought to be thinking about something—how she came to be here, for instance. It really does feel like a dream. She thinks of that quiet, rainy afternoon a few months ago, when she opened an email that began with Congratulations!: The Guardian was offering her a full scholarship and living stipend to study for an MA in Journalism at Goldsmiths. Friends came to Imam Khomeini Airport to see her off. They embraced. They said goodbye. Just before she stepped through into the departure lounge, she turned her head—and saw Leila and Leya, the twins she was closest to, her two colleagues, walking away arm in arm. On Leya’s blue backpack hung a hand-crocheted sunflower, a birthday gift from Narges. Leila’s had a small brown bear.
Leya has one dimple. Leila has two. That’s how she tells them apart. Their light amber irises are different too—more blue in Leila’s eyes, more orange in Leya’s—but when they smile, both are so beautiful: arched brows, long-drawn eyeliner, always wearing so much jewelry, always in different clothes. Leila has a red nose stud that looks like a tiny cinnabar mole.
Will I ever see them again?
She gazes at the creases in the paper, her mood calm. The folds have grown deeper; a small tear has opened along one of them. The sky outside is grey-blue. She thinks of Lunar House’s purple sign. In the murky, unresolved grey—in weather like London’s, in expressions left half-spoken, in the countless fates that people did not choose for themselves—in the air, in the weight of it all: breath, or sigh.
Twenty-three people share this space with her. Narges counted—professional habit. Leila and Leya had started working two years before her, and they told her: a good journalist walks into any room and counts the heads first. The temperature in July was pushing forty degrees. That was Tehran. In the newsroom: the hum of fluorescent lights threaded through the sound of the central air conditioning, carrying a faint smell of ozone. Colleagues debating promises that the country’s leaders would never keep. Coffee steaming.
Now, she has put her phone on airplane mode.
She doesn’t want to receive any more messages before the interview. She feels scattered. She doesn’t know how she’ll organize her words, how she’ll tell all of this, doesn’t know whether any of it will be believed. Good news, bad news, everyone’s stories, everyone’s problems—she doesn’t want to know how last week’s exam went, doesn’t want to know whether Nasga’s dog has recovered from its illness, doesn’t want to know about job interview results, medical results, whether there’s a new diagnosis.
The interview hasn’t begun. She knows she shouldn’t think about outcomes. If the outcome doesn’t yet exist, then she is neither the Narges who has been approved to stay nor the Narges who has been refused. But this is precisely her favorite state—unlike most people. Any outcome, good or bad, would bring pressure; the unresolved, paradoxically, gives her ease. Two versions of herself, herself in different worlds, superimposed, equally real, both exposed on the same sheet of photo paper.
She smiles. She’s a little hungry, she thinks. When this is over, what should she eat? Her appetite is always, against all odds, excellent.
Last semester she sat in on a quantum physics lecture—a friend had insisted, and she hadn’t wanted to refuse. The friend asked why she hadn’t continued with mathematics after her undergraduate degree, why she’d become a journalist instead. Was it that she didn’t like it? Narges shook her head. She said she liked the other thing more. She didn’t want to tell her friend the real reason: she felt she ought to do the right thing rather than the thing she loved, even at a cost. And doing the right thing, for her, included not requiring others to do what she considered right. So most of the time she simply smiled, or said nothing, like someone genuinely introverted. To keep others from seeing the pull of it.
But she hadn’t left that physics classroom.
The professor wrote ψ on the blackboard and said: The state of a system is not “we don’t know if it’s A or B.” It is genuinely both A and B simultaneously—until the moment of observation.
Narges wrote a line in her notebook: Then the moment before observation is the most honest moment of all.
Her folder rests on her lap, heavy—over a hundred pages of documents. Photocopied press clippings. Screenshots printed out as photographs. Interview notes written from memory, which had originally lived in her apartment in Tehran.
She had never imagined she wouldn’t go back. She had assumed she could return at any time. Her small bag held very little. She finds herself missing that brown leather notebook, her countless recordings, the manuscripts and certificates of commendation pressed under her desk drawer at the paper—all of it left behind, perhaps already confiscated, perhaps already gone.
She has no way to go back and check.
But if you don’t check, it won’t collapse.
The man sitting diagonally across from her looks to be in his fifties. He’s wearing a blue jacket, washed so many times the collar has begun to pill. His eyes are fixed on the floor in front of him. She recognizes that look—the hollowed-out state that follows too much thought, too much exhaustion. Like a computer screen that’s gone black but whose power light is still on. She wants so badly to ask. Decades of professional training have turned her into something more like a machine: no matter how much pain she absorbs, she can think with emotional steadiness, can even face interrogation with something approaching good humor. The cost is that when she sees others suffer she often overcorrects, processing everything with professional detachment. Journalistic method like some kind of medication, the cost like some kind of side effect. She can’t help wondering: What is his story? What is he waiting for? What is his number? Where is he from? When he left, did he have time to bring the thing he most wanted to bring?
She doesn’t ask. She is no longer a journalist. Or rather, she doesn’t yet know whether she still is.
That, too, is a superposition.
The door opens. B-09 is called. The man doesn’t move. Not him.
Narges bows her head and puts her phone back in her bag without switching off airplane mode—just holds it for a moment, feeling its familiar weight, then lets it go.
Outside, it begins to rain.
II. Dissipation
Three months ago. Late at night. A student flat with red brick walls, somewhere in East London.
The thesis deadline is tomorrow at five in the afternoon. The title is Survival Strategies of Independent Iranian Media in the Age of Digital Censorship. Narges has written as far as Chapter Three, Section Four. The cursor blinks on the screen. Her fingers slide from the middle of the trackpad to the upper left corner, triggering the sleep command; then she presses her hand back onto the fingerprint key, wakes the screen, opens a new tab, closes it. Opens another. Tehran time: 3:30 a.m. Her fingers rest on the keyboard without pressing any key.
The news of Hammihan‘s closure came on the nineteenth of January. That day she was in this one-bedroom flat, the windowpane fogged with condensation. Her Iranian phone number had already been disconnected; she learned it through an encrypted message from a friend still in Tehran. The exact words her friend sent were: It’s all over.
She just sat there. For a very long time. She was eating a box of chocolate bars, her hands a little cold, so she got up and added more hot water to her mug. She went on eating, and began to think about what, exactly, she could do. There was even something like a strange smile on her face. On the desk sat her pill bottle. She picked it up and shook it, listening to the rattling sound.
She remembered that when she first started the medication, the doctor had warned her: common side effects include emotional blunting—possibly a blunting of joy, possibly of grief. She had said: That’s fine, doctor. I work in journalism. I may need some extra protection to stay mentally healthy.
Now she feels puzzled. She isn’t crying. She isn’t speaking. She is so calm—she feels as though she is experiencing a purely physical phenomenon, like gravity, or weightlessness. Her emotions are not numb. She has not accepted this outcome. She has simply shifted into a different way of experiencing and feeling things. She is stepping back—retreating to a distance far enough from everything—so that all of it falls from wound back into fact, and fact can be observed, explored, rationally described.
But a wound cannot.
The last piece Narges published in Hammihan was a report on a raid on a hospital in Mashhad. Security forces had walked into the emergency room and taken young people still on IV drips from their beds. A nurse had hidden in a storage room and sent her messages. In the words, she could feel a very restrained fury—a string pulled to its limit, but not yet broken.
She received those messages in the newsroom. Outside, a strong wind was blowing. The city’s internet was flickering, stuttering, like a person trembling. She asked herself: Are you cold? She shook her head. After reading the messages three times over, she sat down at her computer and began to write.
That piece became one of the final reasons the newspaper was shut down. Its title appeared on the suspension order from the Press Supervisory Board. For days now, she has been wondering: if she hadn’t written it, or had written it more cautiously, could the paper have survived a few months longer?
But the question doesn’t carry much weight. She wrote it, because it was something that had really happened. The most important thing, for a person, is honesty. Even if the cost of writing it is to disappear along with the paper itself. Even if—she has said this to others again and again—no career is worth your health, let alone your existence itself. She has never lacked for sound judgment or values. But this was a different situation. You didn’t write it for your career. You wrote it because the nurse was typing with trembling hands inside a storage room. You wrote it because if you didn’t write it down, the thing would never have happened at all.
She writes about others’ stories in her own thesis—about the media ecology she was once part of. As she writes, she wonders: how can a person be simultaneously someone who does volunteer work helping asylum seekers and refugees, and themselves an asylum seeker? How did she end up becoming a footnote in her own research, a data point to be cited in Chapter Three, Section Four? This is absurd, of course. But it is not shameful.
Nothing and no one can make her feel shame or guilt, anger or unease. She owes nothing to anyone. People need to do things, to contribute—but sometimes doing things is precisely a way of eliminating guilt. Of freeing herself from feeling responsible for the world being what it is.
She told the officer conducting her interview: I’m still too young. I’m not ready to be a martyr yet. I still have more things to do.
Right now is the moment for doing more things. She types a line into the document: The observer does not exist outside what is observed. The observer can also be part of the story. Then she thinks: perhaps this is the thesis’s real argument.
She moves the cursor back to Chapter Three, Section Four, and begins to write.
Why does it always rain in this country, in this city? Eight in the evening. The streetlights outside turn the rain into irregular patches of light. The medication she took in the morning has worn off by now. But she doesn’t resist moments like this—her thoughts begin to drift across different times, different spaces: this flat, now; the storage room in that hospital; the goodbye in the newsroom as she left for the last time; her favorite café. She has only recently come to understand this. It is not something terrible. Thinking like this is perhaps a way of refusing to live inside a linear world. Her mind instinctively resists “endings”—in linear time, an ending means cessation. But if time is overlapping, interlocking, then all moments, all histories, continue to exist, only in different coordinates.
2:28 a.m. She hits save. Drinks the last mouthful of cold tea. Closes the laptop and sets it on the desk. Leans against the headboard, and falls asleep.
The thesis is submitted the following day at 4:58 p.m.
III. An Observer Present
Six weeks ago. An online class, one afternoon.
Pál Walsh is a professor of journalism ethics. He also loves science fiction, and loves quantum physics—you can tell from his classes, where his interest in quantum physics far outstrips his interest in journalism ethics.
He is lecturing on the Observer Effect. “The observer effect tells us,” he says, to the twenty-odd faces in their small windows on the screen, “that it is the act of observation itself that changes what is being observed. This is not a metaphor. It is a physical fact. When you measure a particle’s position, you alter its momentum. There is no such thing as observing anything in a completely neutral way.”
Narges listens, and watches the window.
She can’t seem to stop thinking about that hospital. She remembers walking into the emergency room. The nurse—she said her name was Fatima. Round face, large eyes, the large eyes of exhaustion. Fatima saw her, and made a small gesture: Stay. Stay here. If you’re here, they won’t dare hit anyone.
She had been to many news scenes. But it was in that moment that she understood: a journalist’s presence is itself a form of intervention. She was not neutral. When she walked into that room with her notebook and camera, the room became an observed room—and an observed room must obey different rules.
Observation is not watching from a distance. Observation is participation.
“And so,” Professor Walsh continues, “the journalist’s dilemma and the physicist’s dilemma are the same dilemma: you cannot not influence what you are recording. The question is not how to eliminate that influence, but how to honestly acknowledge its existence, and incorporate it into your account.”
Narges writes in her notebook: An honest witness acknowledges their own coordinates.
She feels her nerves pulse, briefly, gently. In the corners of countless unfamiliar cities, she has always found trees she thought existed only in her home country—and here they are, growing, with the same shapes and light and shadow. The same warm sun, the same wet rain, the same season. Even the smell of the air is the same.
She recognizes them.
After class, she sends a message to a friend—a photographer from Tehran, now in Berlin, who had appeared in person to testify on her behalf during her interview. She tells her: Today I found journalism ethics inside physics. Or maybe I learned some physics in a journalism ethics class.
Her friend replies: So you’ve found the explanation for why we can’t do “objective reporting”?
She replies: Not necessarily an explanation. But I think I’ve found a reason I no longer need to feel guilty about it.
Then she puts her phone on the table, and in the last light of the setting sun, the metronome on the table goes tick, tick, tick—she feels herself finally releasing something: the struggle, the compulsion to ask why, the urge to give everything a perfect explanation. She simply lets things settle where they belong. What cannot be explained, she will not try to explain. Why the world is as it is—if she has looked and still found no answer, she will let it stay there. Because even most scientific research arrives at no definitive conclusion.
As healthy individuals, we do not need to blindly believe in perfect decisions. What we need is a society capable of continuous judgment and continuous discussion. We must have the courage to bear this. In the final lines of her thesis, she writes this.
Many things survive longer in ambiguity than in clarity.
IV. Dissipative Structure
Today. Some time after a certain moment.
She wants to boil a kettle of water.
The kettle sits on the stove. Narges stands in the kitchen. The water begins to warm. Bubbles appear along the bottom of the kettle—small, not yet strong enough to rise, clinging to the metal surface, slowly growing, multiplying.
She thinks again of the moment she walked out of Lunar House. She walked for a long time, along a route long enough, loud enough, strange enough to let everything that had just happened settle into the place where it belonged, rather than let it take up all the space.
Earlier today, she retrieved a white envelope from the letterbox—from the immigration authority, A4-sized, heavy, her name and address printed on the front. They had decided her life. Even earlier than that, near a water tower in the south of the city, she had found a swing hanging high enough to really feel it, and played on it for twenty minutes. In many moments, she feels she is still a child. She is not yet thirty. She hasn’t graduated yet. She still has so much she hopes for, so much she longs for in life. In May, the film she’s been looking forward to most this year is opening. A friend who works at Iran International has asked whether she’s considered joining them after graduation; she hasn’t replied yet. The narcissus have begun to show their yellow buds.
But she thinks of her companions. She thinks of her journalist friends, Leila and Leya. Three days after the paper closed, she lost contact with them. They never answered her calls again. The last message they sent her was: Narges, don’t come back. They’re looking for you.
She feels the weight of the envelope, and puts it in the drawer.
The water is still boiling. She will open the letter—but not now. Now she wants to drink her black tea.
She notices that her heartbeat is calm.
The outcome may be good or bad. Once, either outcome would have been too much to bear. But she has been changed by the waiting itself—changed into someone who can carry this result, or any result. When has she not faced something more frightening than this? Narges on the hard chair in the interrogation room, answering every question without hesitation. Narges in the waiting room folding paper cranes, waiting for the doctor to tell her the test results. Narges sitting in the small hours in front of a blinking cursor. Narges who had been so overwhelmed she could barely study, who opened her grades and found she had scraped through, not failed, and felt a rush of pure joy. Narges who so badly wanted to cry when her Ukrainian friend Liudmyla told her that relatives had died in the war. Every one of these moments is real. Every one is complete. No outcome can adjudicate a whole life—not hers, not any journalist’s, not any political prisoner’s, not any dissident’s. Behind each protected status is a complex human being. No outcome can make any of it more meaningful or less.
She will keep doing things—necessary things. And she will keep doing things that aren’t quite so necessary. The copy of Euclid’s Elements she ordered is nearly here. She wants to find out whether she can still do what she once did: spend an entire warm spring afternoon working through proofs.
But just now, she has discovered that her physics professor once made an annotation in the margins of the textbook she has read to pieces. She doesn’t know when he wrote it. She opens her laptop and looks it up. It’s a concept from Prigogine—called dissipative structure:
A system far from equilibrium maintains its own order and complexity through the continuous absorption of external energy. In other words, life does not exist by resisting chaos—it exists by digesting chaos. The more you try to lock down every variable, to maintain absolute stability, the closer you come to death in the thermodynamic sense—
—a state called “equilibrium,” in which nothing flows, nothing changes, everything is already known. Which is physics’ other name for death.
The water boils.
Narges turns off the stove. Pinches a teabag with an easy hand and drops it into the cup. Pours the water. The color of the tea spreads through the hot water, diffusing without edge or outline, slowly turning the water into something else. She waits patiently until the tea is cool enough to drink, places a sugar cube in her mouth, and slowly draws in a sip. If she were in Iran, she could brew a pot of strong Earl Grey slowly on the stove with a samovar. She rather misses it. She opens the window. The wind moves through her newly cut short hair.
She sends her mother a message.
Short—in Persian: Maman, I miss you. The weather is nice today. I’m doing well.
She doesn’t write anything more. Some things don’t need to be transmitted in a message, because they are not information—they are a state of being, and a state can only be felt, not transmitted. She knows that her mother will know. Not necessarily through words, but through the texture of this message sent at this moment, through her silence, through the way she chooses what to say and what not to say—she will read the rest of it there.
Perhaps that too is a kind of quantum effect: some things exist in the space between receiver and sender, belonging to neither side.
Narges carries her tea to the window, opens her thesis draft, sighs, pushes it to the corner of the screen, then opens a blank document.
She begins to write something that sits between the two—the trembling nurse who sent messages from inside a storage room (she knows the nurse has also escaped; she will go to meet her in person); what she didn’t see: what she imagines of the newsroom’s last night, before she left for good; the crease lines on the slip of paper; the look in the eyes of the man in the blue jacket in the waiting room; all that she has witnessed, all she is living through, all she has not yet come to know.
Note: Narges is a Persian name meaning narcissus.
Hammihan, meaning “fellow countrymen” or “compatriots,” was suspended indefinitely by Iran’s Press Supervisory Board on January 19, 2026, cited for its coverage of protests and the security forces’ raid on a hospital.
The theory of dissipative structures was proposed by physical chemist Ilya Prigogine, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1977.