In the summer of 2013, I was in Cairo, Egypt. I was on assignment for Al Jazeera, covering a major political upheaval.

The president at the time, a guy named Mohamed Morsi, who was affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, had been deposed and jailed in what his supporters said was a military coup.

So, in protest, they set up these sit-ins in the city. It was a hot, crazy summer—really tense. And by the middle of August, the government finally did what they’d been threatening to do, which is to clear the sit-ins. But they did so with unabated violence.

They started shooting at people in the sit-ins and the surrounding neighborhoods at around seven in the morning and didn’t stop until well into the night, until pretty much everybody was either dead or arrested.

I’ve never seen anything like it. It was a massacre in broad daylight in a capital city of roughly 20 million.

So the next day I went to a mosque where maybe two hundred or so of those bodies were being kept. A lot of them were badly burned, and there were blocks of ice on top of them. There were family members going in and out of this mosque, trying to identify their loved ones.

It was intensely chaotic and emotional.

I am with a producer who works in the local bureau and can translate Arabic for me. We walk outside and start talking to a woman who says that her husband is among the dead. She’s shaking and in shock, and she’s describing her last phone conversation with her husband, which ended when the shooting started.

She describes him as an engineer who was unarmed and the father of her four children. My colleague is translating, and I’m not even looking up. I’m just in my notebook, furiously writing, not wanting to miss a detail.

And then my colleague stops translating while the woman is still talking, and I look up at him. And the look on my face is like, Dude, what?

He leans in and whispers, “Um, now would be a good time for you to put an arm around her.”

This makes my little reporter’s brain totally short-circuit, because I am not a touchy-feely person. I don’t hug you for you to tell me your story; that is not how it works.

But the look on his face was clear: Get over yourself and be human. Now. Put your arm around her.

So I robotically lift my arm, and the second my hand touches her, she collapses into my chest. She’s a tiny woman. And she sinks into me and starts sobbing as she’s holding on to me. I’m still holding my pen and paper. And it hits me hard that this woman doesn’t care what kind of reporter I am or what my stupid little rules are.

She wants me to register what is happening to her on the worst day of her life.

She wants me to bear witness.

I should have known better, and in fact I did know better.

Two years prior to that, in the spring of 2011, was the start of the uprising in Syria, what is now the civil war. I was sitting in the newsroom in Al Jazeera’s headquarters in Qatar, watching grainy YouTube footage of unarmed civilians being mowed down by the Syrian military.

At the same time, we had a government spokesperson on our airwaves claiming that this wasn’t really happening—it was a distortion of the truth; there was a conspiracy. We couldn’t confirm any of this, because they’d already shut down our bureau in Damascus and they weren’t issuing journalist visas.

So what to do? Well, I’m a multinational. I have an Iranian passport. So my boss agreed to deploy me to Syria, where I wouldn’t need a visa to enter, just to see what’s going on.

I fly into Damascus, and unfortunately for me, at this point the Syrian authorities have already become super paranoid.

So they go through my luggage and find a satellite phone, which is not a big deal. If you travel in that part of the world, you know that outside of major cities you don’t really have cell-phone coverage. You can buy a satellite phone at any shopping mall; it’s not spy gear.

But this was enough for them to get suspicious. So they strip-searched me and found my American passport in the pocket of my jeans. In this passport was a stamp from Al Jazeera, who sponsored my visa for Qatar—it’s what I needed to reenter the country.

This escalated things.

They took me into a tiny office and sat me between two guys on a couch. There were all these other guys on their computers, chain-smoking and banging out some kind of report on me.

When the report was done, the two guys sitting on either side of me got up and strapped on a bunch of guns. They peeled me from the couch, and they led me to the parking garage under the airport. They sat me between them in the backseat, with another armed man in the front seat, and drove off into the night.

We pulled into a compound. There were three or four checkpoints to get into this compound, so I assumed it was some sort of government building. They pulled me out of the car by my hair and threw me in front of a desk in a dimly lit portable office.

There were all these men yelling at me, and I looked down and saw that I was standing in a considerable amount of somebody else’s blood.

They processed me for some kind of arrest, blindfolded me, handcuffed me, and took me to an interrogation with a man who told me to call him Firas.

Nothing I said was accepted by Firas: that I was a reporter, that I wasn’t part of some conspiracy. He didn’t even believe that I didn’t speak Arabic. So I realized very quickly that truth had no currency there. They handcuffed me again, blindfolded me, and threw me into a cell.

I took off the blindfold and saw that I was in a cell that was covered in blood—so much that I didn’t know where to stand or lean. So I kind of squatted in the corner and tried to wrap my head around the hell that I was in.

An hour or two later, a guy comes to the door and he yells out my father’s name, which is also printed in my Iranian passport. He yells out “Fayrouz!” He can’t tell the difference between my name and my father’s name, I guess. So I get up, and he blindfolds me and handcuffs me.

I thought that I was being taken to another interrogation, but he took me outside into a courtyard and slammed me up against a wall. I could hear people being tortured a few feet away from me. I could hear the guards, the Mukhābarāt, joking and laughing, and I could smell their cigarettes.

They were acting like regular employees on a coffee break. And I stood against that wall and I thought to myself, They’re going to kill me. And worse than that thought—believe it or not—worse than dying was the thought of dying like that, which is to say alone, because I was alone.

I couldn’t locate the humanity in the people around me, and I knew that I was going to be an anonymous body. If I was lucky, they would throw me in a ditch, and my father, whose name was being called out in that place, would never have any peace: he’d never know what had happened to me.

I’ve never felt so alone in my life.

So after about twenty minutes of shivering against this wall and waiting to be shot in the head, I get pulled off and taken back inside.

I kept thinking, Well, okay. They didn’t kill me now, but they are going to kill me, because why, why, why would they let a reporter not cover a street protest but see and hear all of this and live?

Of course I’m going to write about it.

I’m going to die—they’re going to kill me was on a pretty tight loop in my head as they threw me back in the cell.

I can hear people being tortured inside the compound. The voices echo and come and go and blend in.

And then there’s one voice that stands out, and I can’t exactly figure out why, except that he sounded obscenely young.

He sounded like a kid, like a teenager—a boy.

And I could tell that there was more than one person hurting him, and he was just howling; he was swearing he didn’t know things.

He was swearing to God he hadn’t done anything wrong.

He was calling out to God; he was calling out to his mother.

I couldn’t take it anymore after a while. It was brutal. So I put my hands up to my ears just to try to block it out.

But the second I did that, I felt such shame, because I realized that this kid was at his own, far worse, version of the wall. He was alone.

He was dying alone.

That’s what was happening.

And so I pulled my hands down to do what I could, which was to hear him.

I couldn’t call out to him to say, I hear you. You’re not alone.

I couldn’t identify him.

I didn’t know his name.

I couldn’t contact his family.

I couldn’t do anything.

All I had was the ability to bear witness in that fashion.

The kid was choking on his own blood in his own country, and nobody was going to know. I felt bearing witness to his suffering was the least I could do.

So I listened to him for a while, and every scream was excruciating. It was like a hole was being cut inside me with every one of them.

And then, rather abruptly, his voice stopped.

A couple of days later, the Syrians decided that maybe it wasn’t a good idea for them to permanently disappear an Iranian citizen, because they have a good relationship with the Iranian government. So they sent me to Iran via extraordinary rendition for additional questioning for a couple of weeks at another prison there.

And much to my surprise, eventually the Iranian authorities freed me and sent me back to my family.

I needed time off, but I didn’t need to go to a spa and breathe alpine air.

What I needed was to work, because not being busy and not working meant the wall was always there. I could feel it, and I wanted to push against that feeling. I couldn’t wait to get back to work.

The second I could, I flung myself into my job, taking every assignment. If they didn’t give me an assignment, I would fight for one: Egypt, Libya, nuclear meltdown in Japan, it didn’t matter. I was doing it.

And I succeeded a little too well in pushing back against that wall and that feeling. And what I did in doing so was create distance between myself and the things I was reporting on, the people I was reporting on.

So when that woman in Egypt fell into my chest and started crying, she destroyed that distance—she entirely eradicated it.

I was back at the wall, and the boy’s voice was in my head.

But as painful as it was, I realized that it was necessary for me to bear witness fully to what was happening to someone beyond the couple of paragraphs they might actually get in a story.

As much as some stories will leave a mark, sometimes that’s just what it takes.

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D. PARVAZ is based in Washington, DC, where she covers US foreign policy. She previously worked at Al Jazeera based out of New York and Qatar, focusing on conflict, democracy, and human rights in the Middle East and North Africa. Prior to moving overseas, she worked at several US-based newspapers covering local and national news.

This story was told on October 12, 2017, at St. Ann’s Church in New York City. The theme of the evening was Hell-Bent. Director: Meg Bowles.