On Sunday, July 3, 1988, an unnamed Iranian woman boards a plane for the second time in her life, having flown earlier that morning from Tehran to Bandar Abbas. She reflects on the dire state of life in Iran: families desperate for food raising chickens in their homes, old women selling family rugs for almost nothing, and young women walking Revolution Street at night, sometimes disappeared by secret police in white vans.

Now boarding the connecting flight from Bandar Abbas to Dubai, she finds it nearly full. After mistakenly sitting next to a hostile mustachioed man, an attendant guides her to her correct seat, 27D, beside an older Arab woman in a chador. She pats her coat pocket to confirm her passport remains safe, treating it as something precious to be protected.

As the plane takes off, she flips through the Iran Air magazine, reading about Kashan rugs and the ancient palace of Dariush, finding grim comfort in the historical inevitability of civilizational collapse. She thinks of the Islamic Republic's brutalities: statues of shahs replaced by ayatollahs, mothers in Isfahan told their sons have been martyred, sons hanged from cranes in Revolution Square.

Once airborne, she relaxes, refusing the guilt rising about the people she is leaving behind. For the first time in memory, she breathes fully and recalls the word emkanat—possibilities. Looking out the window, she sees ocean below and two tiny white pebbles in the distance, possibly moving closer. Unlike the cynics she knows, she truly believes tomorrow will be better than today.