Pain Creeps Through the Window

It's 8:44 PM. I am sitting and staring at the glittering stars in the sky. This time, I am not listening to a podcast or watching any online videos from the other world.

Maybe I can say it's an escape from something I can't escape, from my reality and the circumstances of my town. For a few seconds, I've just been trying, to have a little bit of stillness—a silence I borrow from the heaven—to see the glittering stars that I envy since humans can't control them and they remain unattainable.

I keep looking at the sky. Even if the drones mar it, their buzzing breaks the night’s silence, and suddenly change the color of the sky to red, declaring a new tragedy for another family, to be added to an endless list.

Now, I think the seconds I have tried to escape my reality have ended before they began. From my place, I can see the street, where many Gazan people are walking. I’ve heard another painful snippet of a conversation from those passing by. From their voices, I guess they are two young men walking after a long and rough day—and that’s what their words demonstrated.

One of them said, "I feel I will die; I don’t have a life here." His friend interrupted him to show him sympathy or to ease his sorrow, because I believe in this saying: "Sorrows, when shared, are lessened." His friend replied, "All I have is nothing." Then their voices disappeared, fading in the echoes of this night. They went to another street, far from me, to complete their lament. Maybe there is a person like me, sitting next to the window, hearing these painful voices, and hearing the rest of their dialogue.

I don’t want to think of what pushes them to say that. Maybe they have lost what they didn’t imagine losing, and I am sure they have lost far more than I can imagine!

The uncanny and agonizing thing is that this isn't the first time that I’ve listened to these kinds of dialogue excerpts, because, from the same window, at different times, my ear caught many sorrowful voices. All of them are events manifested in concise words, for they know the words can’t summarize anything.

The second broken dialogue I heard was between a father and his son. And I can guess from the voice of the son that he is young, maybe about 12 years old. How I wished he were older than he was at that time—old enough to bear this kind of responsibility for a kid like him. He said, in a strangled voice of grief, “I don’t wanna sell.” I didn’t hear his father's voice until a few heavy seconds later; he replied: “Why?” The son answered in a fast way, as if he had been waiting to hear this question for a while, but maybe the long wait for this question had left him satisfied with the short words, “There is no reason; I just don’t wanna sell!” A silence prevailed, heavier this time. I remembered stopping what I was doing at that time and just waiting for my ear to catch the father’s reply. Finally, he replied in a forceful and sharp voice, but incapable of any further answer, he said, “Scream aloud, calling out ‘candy.’ That was all. Now go." The child surrendered, realizing there is no way but to agree to sell candy. So, his voice burst forth suddenly, laden with the weight of responsibilities that lay upon him.

He called out in a strong voice: "Candy!" I think the son realized that he had become a father now. A father at the age of 14 years old, for children he didn’t give birth to, but a father for the responsibilities this war has brought upon him!

Though I could watch them from my window, I didn’t dare to look because I didn't want to see the oppression painted in the father’s gaze. As I have seen many such gazes, they always accompany me every time as if they happened just a minute ago, and until now I haven't forgotten them.

Finally, the third dialogue—the last one my memory recalls from that window, not from the whole war—was the most painful one. It was between two young men; they were walking in the street at night. One of them said, “Alhamdulillah; at least he found someone to bury him. We don’t know if we will find one to do this for us!”The two young men walked away, and their voices slowly ebbed away, but there were voices entering my inner thoughts at that time to exhaust me more and more.

But why didn’t I hear normal dialogues from this window? Why didn’t the two young men in the first dialogue say, “We have everything we want; this is the life that we want from the place that we feel most at home”? Why the father and his son weren’t fighting to prevent the son from playing basketball and this time to have a rest, not for struggling to make ends meet and survive.” And why weren’t the last two young men talking about “the wedding of that person whom they were talking about, not for his death, and they have a lot of people to share with them this joyful event”?

Maybe these kinds of normal dialogues that I want to listen to are happening in the other world that I watch them from in online videos or listen to them by podcasts!

This is one of the roughest lessons the war has taught me. I never blame any Gazan person for what he is saying or what he is doing unless I really understand his circumstances and know if he has lost someone or not. I mean, how many has he lost—was it a family member or a friend? Do you know what? It doesn’t matter who has lost. Because the feeling of loss is the same, as he is a ghost, breaking into our life without permission.

I will always sit at that window. And maybe I would be alive to hear about peace returning after loss, about laughter ringing with the echo of triumph, and about carrying the promise of tidings long awaited from the conversation between those same people.