Until 2022, I never thought that one day I would write stories.

I was a second-year student in the Faculty of Engineering, and my dreams were filled with designing the buildings of the future. I had even once dreamed that I had designed Afghanistan's first skyscraper.

I have chosen “Roya” as my pen name; a word that in Persian refers both to what we see in our sleep and to the plans and wishes that we create in our minds. I do not want to forget my dream of engineering, but I am afraid that it may be too late. It is already too late; the authoritarian and misogynistic Taliban have closed the doors of schools and universities to girls.

By now, I could have been an engineer; I could have worked in a construction company, seen my role in blueprints, and spent hours working on reconciling concrete with camel-colored mud bricks; but now, like thousands of Afghan girls and women, I am imprisoned within the four walls of my home.

I rarely want to go to the city because all the laws and rules of the city are now made by extremist men. No woman or girl can see herself in the mirrors of the city. We must wear face coverings because a smile is forbidden for women. We must hide our hair beneath the hijab because the dance of each strand of our hair in the air can sexually arouse men. Our feet and hands must be completely covered so that Taliban Islam may be observed.

The Taliban's Commander of the Faithful has even said that, in their particular version of Islam, women's voices are “awrah” and must not be raised and must remain veiled. There must even be a veil for women's voices.

Now only my pen hears my voice and writes it upon the notebook that remains from my student days. I never thought that, following the algebraic formulas that were left unfinished by the Taliban's takeover, I would write stories in this notebook. One day, I also wrote a few lines of poetry, but they turned out to be without meter. Now, most of my time is spent writing stories and reading novels and short stories.

My mind was so engineering-oriented that I thought reading novels was a pointless pastime. If someone recommended a novel, I would hastily say:

– If they have made a film based on it, I will watch the film; but I do not want the novel.

I had also read very few short stories; and that was mostly because I was required to do literature homework.

At the faculty, we even called the students of the Faculty of Literature “canaries and nightingales.” To us, literature was like the singing of a canary in a cage on the veranda of grandmother's house; something beautiful but not necessary, unlike buildings that could become shelter for human beings.

That was my perception at the time. Before literature became engineering and built a shelter for me out of words.

The first year after the fall of Kabul was a year of severe depression for me and my friends. We spoke with one another for hours on our mobile phones, but we did not dare visit each other.

The Taliban's policies were still not clear or predictable to us. Every day, we woke up in fear, and before looking into the mirror, we picked up our phones to see what new news had been published.

Will the universities reopen? Will girls be allowed to return to their classrooms? Is this situation temporary?

In those days, all of us thought about our previous lives, which had become nothing more than a dream and even a nightmare. It was as though life had been divided into two parts: before the fall of Kabul and after the fall of Kabul.

Before that, I had plans for my future. I had a notebook in which I had written my five-year and ten-year goals. At the age of twenty-five, I wanted to have a master's degree. At the age of thirty, I wanted several of the city's famous buildings to be my work. I had even chosen the name of a company to start my own business: Bagh-e Bala Engineering Company.

Bagh-e Bala is a scenic place in Kabul where the Intercontinental Hotel is located. A hotel where women once swam in its pool, but now fighters wrestle there. Wrestling of terror!

But suddenly, domestic corrupt figures, the Americans, and the Taliban decided to play a cruel joke on the lives of me and thousands of other women and girls. The university was closed to girls, and we were driven back into our homes. In the early days, I still kept my university clothes in the wardrobe, and every time I opened it, I imagined that I would return to class after a few more weeks.

A few weeks? A few months? A few years?

My mother would say:

– These days, too, shall pass.

But no one knew how long these days would continue.

Gradually, time lost its meaning. There was no longer much difference between Saturday and Wednesday. I woke up late in the mornings and stayed awake late into the night. Sometimes I looked at my engineering books. My engineering mathematics and structural analysis books were still on my desk, but it was as though they had been written in a language that I no longer understood.

Not only were girls not permitted to attend university, but women were also prohibited from working outside the home. Women are only allowed to do the things that men permit them to do. One of my classmates now sells pickles and jam. Another girl, who was an engineer, now weaves carpets to support her family.

One day, one of my friends said:

– To think less, read novels.

She also introduced me to the Pen Afghanistan online class on WhatsApp, a class that was held on Thursdays. It was a strange suggestion. In my mind, novels were something people read to escape reality, and in those days I was clinging to reality more than ever. But in the end, I gave in simply for entertainment.

When I joined the Pen Afghanistan online class, they were discussing the stories of Ernest Hemingway, and I became fascinated by his “iceberg theory.” The first novel I read was by Elif Shafak, a novel that had become common reading among girls. I thought that after finishing it, I would return to my previous life, but that did not happen. In the Pen Afghanistan workshop, I was introduced to the works of Knut Hamsun, Rahnaward Zaryab, Gabriel García Márquez, Khosrow Mani, and many others.

But one day, while reading a story by Anton Chekhov, something else happened.

For the first time, I felt that literature was not merely entertainment. Literature is another way of living. When I read novels, I would leave my small room, which was in the corner of the kitchen, for a few hours and enter another world; a world in which girls could study, travel, fall in love, and make decisions about their own futures.

After that, I read one novel after another. Then short stories. And suddenly I realized that the same girl who once called literature students “canaries and nightingales” was now underlining the sentences of writers and whispering passages from texts.

The first story I wrote ended up resembling a Korean television series in a rather laughable way. I still keep it in a folder on my laptop. It was a very bad story; full of long and emotional sentences. But when I finished it, I felt something similar to completing an engineering project. It was as if I had built something.

Several times, I created Facebook pages under a pen name to share my stories, but then I deleted them again. I did not want to write under a pseudonym. Perhaps I did not believe in my work very much.

Now, writing is no longer foreign to me. My pen is the continuation of my veins. Perhaps all these years only my building materials had changed; instead of stone, gravel, and concrete, I was working with words.

And yet I remain silent for a few seconds, when people ask me:

– What do you do?

If I say I am a writer, I feel as though I have lied to the girl who sat in the second year of engineering and looked eagerly at the professor's blackboard. And if I say I am an engineer, a voice inside me says:

– But you were never allowed to become an engineer.

Sometimes I think that the Taliban did not only close the gates of the university; they also stopped time and took it back fourteen hundred years. My life and the lives of other girls remain suspended somewhere between the past and the future. We can neither return to the past nor know when we will be allowed to move forward.

But we keep moving forward. The world and our homeland will not forget that it was not only the women and girls of Afghanistan who refused to surrender to the Taliban. We went to the streets. We were imprisoned. We were tortured. But we did not surrender. We still have not surrendered.

During the first two years, the men in our families stood beside us and worked with us, but now their hopelessness is greater than our despair. They say:

– Even if you study online, you have no chance of finding work. It is better to think about finding a good husband.

The best men in Afghanistan are no longer those who give women the right to choose in every aspect of life. The best men now are those who allow girls to choose one husband from among several men! What a tragic paradox!

Some nights, I dream of the university. In my dreams, I walk once again through the corridors of the faculty. I hear the voices of my classmates and smell the scent of newly printed books in the library. Even the details have not changed. The professor enters the classroom, and I hurry to prepare my notes.

But I always wake up before the lesson ends. Several times in my dreams, the Taliban entered the classroom. They struck the teacher with the butt of a rifle and drove us girls away with whips.

Sometimes I ask myself: if the fall of Kabul had never happened, would I ever have become a writer? I do not know the answer to that question. Perhaps not. Perhaps now I would be working all day in an engineering office and would not even have time to read a short story.

Life sometimes discovers our talents in cruel ways.

I never chose to become a writer, just as I never chose for my university to be closed. These two events entered my life hand in hand; one took something away from me, and the other gave me something in return.

But I still do not know whether this bargain has been fair.

Every time I hear news that universities may reopen, my heart beats faster. A part of me is still waiting. Perhaps that is why I have not thrown away my engineering books. They are still on the shelf in my room; covered in dust, but still present. These books are the memorial statues of my murdered dreams.

But beside those books, there is now another shelf; a shelf full of novels and collections of short stories. If someone had told me ten years ago that one day my novels would outnumber my engineering books, I would probably have laughed out loud.

Life is stranger than any story I have ever read.

Today, when I sit at my desk and write, I sometimes feel that two people live inside me; the girl who is still designing Afghanistan's first skyscraper, and the woman who is trying to build a home for her memories and sorrows with words.

Perhaps neither of them has defeated the other.

I still love my pen name: Roya.

Because this name refers both to the dreams I have seen and to the future that I still have not dared to give up. Perhaps one day the gates of the universities will reopen. Perhaps one day a girl in Afghanistan will design her country's first skyscraper.

And if that girl is not me, I hope she will be one of the readers of my stories; a girl who knows that no government can shut down dreams forever.

Until that day, I will continue to write.

Not because I have forgotten my dream of engineering, but because some buildings cannot be built with stone, brick, and steel. Some buildings are built from words; buildings whose roof is hope and whose pillars are our dreams.

And perhaps, just perhaps, I am still an engineer; an engineer of dreams.