December 2, 2023

We were together with my extended family in our grandparent’s ground floor apartment in the building where we all lived in Shujaiya, our lovely neighborhood. During the war, the ground floor was the safest place to be, so our whole family was all crammed together in a few rooms.

My parents, my siblings, and I had gone to bed in a small room filled with our belongings. My uncles and their wives and sons were in another room, and my aunts with their sons were in my grandmother’s room. These rooms had multiple uses; by day they also served as the kitchen, living room, and dining room. Our family, like many other families, was trying to find safety away from the dangerous areas that the Israeli occupation army had forced people to evacuate. But there was and still is no safe place in Gaza.

I lay in my bed in the dark that night, trying to close my eyes, but I couldn’t sleep. I was worried about what would happen now that the seven-day humanitarian ceasefire was over. Suddenly, I found myself thrown from my bed and crushed against the wall because of an airstrike that rained down on our relative’s building, which was next door to ours.

Just then another bombing shook the ground, and another building was destroyed close to our home, more people killed, more torn flesh flying through the dawn air, a dawn that they would never see. In less than a minute, two buildings were leveled to the ground and two families were killed in their beds. I would soon find out that one of those families were our relatives.

I struggled to stand on my quivering legs, and I began desperately searching for my family — but there was no one to be seen because there were no lights to see anything. Where were they? Where was I even? The air was filled with dust, and a heavy smoke entered my mouth with the bad smell of the airstrikes around us. In that moment, I was trapped in fear and chaos.

After a few agonizing hours of searching through the rubble, after my dad and uncles hastily burying 18 of our relatives, most of them women and children, our surviving family sat together in one room without speaking, crying, or moving. Our eyes yearned to weep, but the tears would not come. We were living the proverb, “How can I cry when I have dry oceans within me?”

It was only a few hours later, but it felt like one month, when one of my sisters told me in a quavering voice that I should look out the window. One horrible thing had already happened to us, and now there was another. In the street outside, a thick, heavy white fog was rolling over everything; it was unlike any fog we had known before; it was strange and had no smell. I sensed something ominous was about to occur. We sat together again, but our minds were not present — we felt only fear, cold, and the grief that surrounded us. Memory after memory, silence after silence, bleeding without blood, crying without tears, screaming without sound.

At midday, while we were still sitting in stunned silence, I turned my gaze to our door, and I felt my heart break. There was a small girl of my kin, barely a year old, in the arms of someone who had found her under the rubble. She was holding candy in her hand, the sweet candy that her grandmother gave her minutes before the family was killed. Her shiny hair was gone. What had she done to deserve this? This baby was crying alone in the wreckage of her house. She was one of the few survivors of the carnage that happened to our relatives.

Ten seconds after this baby was brought to our door, without warning more bombs fell on our narrow street. We all ran without knowing where to go. My legs raced one way and then another, as though they had a mind of their own. I saw a building collapsing behind me, flames licking at the windows, black smoke choking my throat. Flames, smoke, dust all around me, I couldn’t see! Where had my parents and my siblings gone?

The walls were cracking apart, the windows were shattering like a woman striking her own face. Something was pulling me towards oblivion, towards nothing! The building was about to collapse! Up and down! Left and right! I was sure we would be killed! The perspiration running down my back, I tried to scream, but no sound came out of my mouth! And I ran gasping, moving in directionless spurts.

Finally, the relentless barrage of airstrikes around our home ceased. I went to survey the damage, to see what happened to our neighbors’ building that had fallen. Then, a trembling breath slipping from my mouth, the ground began to blur, and I felt hot tears running down my cheeks. What I saw made me feel faint and tremble. It was not just that one building, but all the buildings had been destroyed. Our entire street was reduced to a gray-black expanse of ash. The rubble was strewn alongside our home’s wall, which was one of the only structures still standing.

In that day filled with so much death and destruction, we decided to leave our home. Mom asked us to pack our bags. Our apartment was on the fifth floor, and I climbed the stairs with heavy tears. My bedroom was destroyed and filled with thick gray ashes, as was the whole apartment.

With tears in my eyes, I picked up my school bag and opened it. Memories of the university flooded my mind, because it was the bag filled with my books, my pencils, and my dreams. In that moment, I remembered my best friends: Deema and Aya, and our laughter, our days together, and the lectures we attended. We studied poetry, translation, literature, linguistics, and phonetics.

Those memories made me freeze in place. How could I abandon my home? My books? My novels and photographs? As I looked through the wooden chest that held all my mementos, trying to decide what to take with me, a strange sound was getting louder. It was the rumble and grind of the Israeli occupation’s tanks approaching our area. I stood holding my newborn clothes, looking at my pictures from when I was in kindergarten, and old notebooks filled with my poems and my stories.

The sound was getting closer by the minute, and we rushed hurriedly to stuff what we could into our small suitcases. My bag was full, and my heart was broken because of everything I had to abandon.

“We must leave right now,” my mom said. “Now!”

At that moment when we fled our home, I left behind my bedroom, which was my favorite place. “Goodbye my best thing, I hope to see you soon,” I said.

When we went on foot to our aunt’s home in the Al-Sahaba neighborhood, I was so afraid. Every minute, every second I was looking at my sibling’s worried faces, remembering our home, our street, and our Gaza. From dawn to dusk, our lives were turned upside down. In the same day, we lost our loved relatives and our home with all its memories and stories.

* * *

When the spring finally came, we returned to our neighborhood, and we found that wildflowers had grown amid the fallen buildings and the rubble. Wildflowers grew above it all, above all our people, and above all their dreams. Our building was the only one in the neighborhood still standing. We found no trace of my mother’s room with the bed that I slept on when I was a baby.

I ran to my beloved bedroom, where I found on the floor a paper covered with dust. I wiped the dust off it and my poem came to life. I read these words: “Where should we bloom in a place where roses die?”