Artist: Lama Besaiso

Soul-gnawing guilt, hollow chest, and a heavy heart. My devoted life partners for the past 643 days.

Fear consumes me as I read every news notification, watch every video, and hear every report about Gaza. What if my family and friends were in these explosions? What if they were passing by the area? Why must my people suffer the unbearable every second of every day?

Fear eats me up as I watch my people being systematically starved with each passing day, watching them disappear into nothingness, watching their bodies become frail, and watching their cheekbones become highlighted and their clothes become increasingly baggy.

Fear weighs in kilos, and with every pound of fear you gain, you lose a pound of sanity, of yourself. It eats at you, gives you no escape, and watches as you slowly fade. It gives you no room to keep up with everything as death lingers from every corner, lurks from every single angle. Death no longer dances in the shadows of our lives; it has become it.

Genocide changes you; it breaks you and deforms you. It twists the bright and beautiful parts of you and turns them into dark, hopeless, and haggard pieces. You stop recognizing yourself, your dreams, and all your future plans. After all, what do they all mean if humanity cannot be saved?

Gazans are killed every day in horrendous ways we call massacres, slaughters, annihilations, mass burials, aid traps, starvation, and many other terms that have done nothing to stop the genocide.

And with every new term that emerges, a piece of humanity dies, a piece of me bids farewell.

As the famous writer and poet, Khalil Gibran, said:

I believe that a person does not die all at once,
But instead dies in pieces.
Each time a friend departs, a part of us dies.
Each time a loved one leaves, a part of us dies.
Each time a dream is killed, a part of us dies.
Until the final death comes,
Only to find that all the parts are already dead—
So it simply gathers them and leaves.

Every morning, I wait for my friends’ messages to calm my fear. I wait for Luna’s messages, where she lists the soaring prices of goods and the difficulty of finding anything to eat at all. I wait for Roaa to tell me her new discoveries of how difficult “tent life” is.  And I wait for Fatma to tell me about how many times she cried that day at work, as she was unable to provide aid to everyone.

And I stand still. I find no words to write, no way to comfort them. I feel the grief in my hands and fingers as I text them bieayn Allah ‘God helps’ and bitahun Insha’Allah ‘This too shall pass’ because words have lost their weight, their power to provide comfort. Even language falls silent now.

How could I just be, just live, as Gaza still suffers? How can I stop the ocean behind my eyes, the consuming grief in my heart, and the constant nausea stuck in my throat?

While discussing the systematic starvation of Gaza, a friend—who survived the starvation of the north during the first year of the genocide—told me: “We’re currently in the worst, worst, worst situation in two years. The bombing was better than this. I no longer know what’s wrong with me and can’t detach from or stop thinking about how hungry I am. It’s not working anymore. I’m always tired, I can’t think properly, and the world is spinning around me. My body can’t take it anymore.”

There was never a day in my life when I would have imagined hearing a friend say that the bombing would be better. I question every day how humanity has reached a point of no return and how the world has allowed this to continue without an end.

As Palestinians, we are born complicated. We are born with generational trauma and mental issues that have been passed down from parent to child since the Nakba of 1948. Still, nothing beats the ongoing trauma we experience and continue to experience every single day of our lives for the past 643 days.

I look for a guidebook on how to navigate this new normalcy and continue my day. Normalcy of carrying my heart, fear, and guilt on my sleeve, of worrying nonstop, of being affected by everything Gaza goes through, and still being able to focus on doing the necessities to sustain a life in the shadows of the insufferable.

Because this isn’t just grief—it’s a new type of pain that alters your path. It becomes the magnifying glass through which you now view the world.

It shapes you into a new version of yourself, and you begin to lose recognition of who you are. It shapes your breath, thoughts, and very being.

And because you cannot understand this new personality, as it doesn’t resemble you in any way, you stop talking, sharing, and venting, as you find no point in doing so, and you have no energy for it.

In the end, you keep wondering where the voices go when no one hears them. And you hope, you pray, with all of your heart, that they would be listened to this time, that this would not be the end, that this too shall pass, that life will be better, and that there will come a day when you see the reason, the wisdom behind all of what’s happening.