I have become a pale person, used to death all around me, who doesn’t care anymore for the things that colored my previous life — fashion, reading, long drives with friends beside the sea, trying a new restaurant, spending time with family. I hardly care anymore about even living. The conflict changed everything in one second and made me a body without a soul.

The beginning of the nightmare

When the conflict started, my father decided to prepare our important things, for fear that anything could happen. For the first time in my life, he asked us to pack our things. My father’s intuition is not usually wrong in such matters. I remember talking to my friends and we were joking and laughing, imagining that this conflict would pass with no impact on our lives, and would end within a few days.

Unfortunately we were wrong. On Oct. 7 the bombing started. Compared to other wars, this time it was strange: it never stopped. They pummeled us with so-called “fire belts” of intensive bombing and missiles.

When night came, the nightmare began. A weird quiet prevailed; we heard only the sounds of explosions one after another. We consoled ourselves that though they may sound close, we would not hear the missile that would kill us. This was the phrase that our parents reassured us with. My family went to sleep, and I stayed up with my brother

But then at 12:50 a.m. on Oct. 8, we suddenly heard the sounds of successive explosions from a violent belt of fire behind our building. We heard the sounds of shattering glass, the sounds of crying, and the voices of people screaming. My family and I wondered where to run to take shelter, knowing that there was no safe place. We were looking at each other in amazement: What was happening? Who is this targeting? Are they targeting us? Where should we go now?

These thoughts were interrupted by my mother’s voice as she told us, “Your dad is injured.” The sentence destroyed me, left me crying like a child. In the suffocating ash, we went downstairs and outside, where we saw our neighbors, in shock, all asking each other what had just happened. No one knew the answer. I remember seeing my neighbor running without her head covering. I saw an old lady trying to escape alone. I saw babies without their parents.

An apocalyptic scene

What we saw that first night was like a scene from the Day of Resurrection. I heard a young man’s voice shout, “My brother was martyred.” I saw a little girl throwing up on the ground and her father crying; the children were shouting; many of the families we knew from our neighborhood were missing; and someone called for the ambulance because his mother was bleeding. Everyone was running toward the unknown. Injuries everywhere. Blood everywhere. Houses were falling apart; the sound of crashing still echoes in my head. The intensity of the continuous bombing followed us, even after we left the building.

We heard the sounds of the explosions and the planes flying overhead, but we had nothing to do but watch them while they were killing us.

An unrecognizable place

My father refused to leave our home, so I returned to him after my mother took my siblings to a safer place. It was unrecognizable: the beautifully arranged house was full of broken glass, its contents spilled across the floor.

That house meant everything to us. My father had sold his beloved car in order to pay for it. My mother had long anticipated the day she would live in it. I had feelings stored up in every corner of that home. I will never forget our evenings, our jokes, the whispers between my sisters and I, and my happiness when I would return home to find that my mum had cooked my favourite meal. I will never forget the amount of comfort I felt when I entered my room after a long day, or when I awoke from some nightmare only to realize I was safe in my room. My mother was a “homebody” who did not like to go out too much. Her most cherished moments were when she could enter her house and say, “There is nothing but my home.”

The windows were shattered, antiques were smashed, the ceiling fallen in. We said: God destined this, and what He wanted He did.

The loss of paradise

My father recovered from his injuries. We went to Deir al-Balah after the occupation forced us to move to areas beyond the southern Gaza Valley. As we reminisced about what had happened that first day, we did not forget any detail; everything will remain engraved in our memories forever. We tried to move on and thanked God a thousand times that our house was not completely destroyed, and that we would be able one day to repair it and return it to how it was.

But our hopes quickly faded when we opened the internet after an interruption (the army had blocked internet access from Gaza to facilitate the massacres), and we saw the bombing of an entire residential block in our area. I kept praying that our home would be intact, and convinced myself that this was not our building, but for the second time, we lost hope. We lost the house forever.

We lost our safe place, our paradise. Once, someone asked me, what’s the worst thing that could happen to you? I didn’t know the answer then; because there are a lot of bad things that could happen to anyone, but now I am pretty sure that losing one’s home is the answer to their question.

When I used to see a person who has lost their home in some calamity, I would always wonder how they felt. Now I know the answer. How can our hearts expand to encompass the size of this pain? How can we comprehend that our home has become a pile of ash?

We are on the 130th day of the conflict and I still remember every detail. I am writing this story 129 days later, and my eyes fill with tears. It has been 129 days since the last time I sat in the warmth of my home,129 days since I felt the comfort of my room, 129 days that have passed heavily. If this is just a nightmare, when will I wake up?