I Can't Face Another Displacement.

2023

Hello.

It’s Friday around 3 PM

In the same place — exile.

My aunt called us from my grandmother’s homeland, Lebanon — a land my grandmother left for the love of my Palestinian grandfather. As she does every day, she called to check on all of us, just to see if we have crossed to the other world yet.

I’ve never spoken to her since the first day of displacement. I had no energy left in me. Grief swallowed who I was.

But today, I said it.

“How are you, Auntie?”

It wasn’t just a sentence.

I wasn’t looking at her face — I was looking behind her. At the stillness around her.

I don’t remember what else she said, because my inner voice grew louder, pulling me into the embrace of those safe, tender days that wrapped around every corner of our home.

Into the color of our chandelier.

Yes, behind my aunt was a chandelier.

Would anyone in this world expect pain to come from a chandelier?

Yes, we ache from a light fixture,

from the door that no longer shuts out the cold, from the fading warmth of the heater long gone, from the absence of our family gatherings, from the silence, from the fragile walls .

So much has been stripped from us.

But what is ours, is still ours.

And we will return. I will return.

2025

We returned. After one year and 5 months

We, as Gazans, sat together — somehow trying to process the stages of this endless annihilation. Maybe it was venting. Maybe it was grieving.

People who lost everything could do nothing but replay their sorrows over and over again.

After much talk, we agreed:

There is nothing harder than displacement.

Displacement is harder than hunger.

And if I gathered every letter in every language, I wouldn’t be able to describe even one feeling I carried while being displaced.

And now — once again — the Israeli army is working to tear us away from the remnants of the warmth of our beloved home into yet another exile.

Again.

I can’t believe it

The label “displaced” still clings to my forehead, refusing to leave.