Could It All Be A Dream?

The house… the winding streets, the old tree, the roads we used to walk with joy,

where we dreamed, we grieved, we laughed without fear.

The ancestral home where we spent long years,

breaking the window of a room while playing ball after our parents left.

Those moments I loved, when dawn would spill its pale colors

through my window, filling the room with gentle light.

Those scents that bring me back to my old wishes…

how I longed to hold onto them forever.

God, how did it all end?

Could this now be just a dream?

I hear the youth outside cheering for a match,

and at the same moment the call to prayer from the nearby mosque.

So many sounds I haven’t heard in two years return suddenly,

but there is one sound that never fades,

a sound that lives in every survivor from Gaza.

Every Gazan knows that survival is not victory.

Survival is breathing amid the ruins,

standing firm while the world tries to crush you,

refusing to disappear, facing the feeling of exile even in places you know.

Survival is breaking, then trying to rebuild yourself,

gathering what remains of you to continue living,

dreaming old dreams as if searching for a spark among the ashes

to warm your heart, even just a little.

Sometimes the days are entirely dark,

and no sunlight appears.

We feel as though we aged before our time,

drowning in strange thoughts and unspeakable feelings.

We remain silent often, because silence has become enough for everything we feel.

Do you know how far they’ve come?

What they’ve endured?

How they’ve lived far from their native shores,

under foreign skies, in cities that do not resemble them?

And Gaza… drowned in the blood of its children,

where lives are spilled as if offerings to sorrow.

I cannot describe their history full of calamities,

no shade of black could capture all that pain.

That sound that haunts them — and haunts us all — still asks the same question:

Why is it only us, among all peoples of the earth, who must reinvent our homeland every day?

Why was the hope we lived by stolen from us?

Isn’t it hard when the one thing that keeps you alive is taken?

Why must we change every few days,

adapt quickly to each new wound,

continue living as if we are never broken?

Is it not hard to live in a place where the thought of escape never leaves you?

Why were we forced to continue the nightmare that we thought we had awoken from?

Why did everything in our dreaming eyes tear apart?

And yet, we try.

We carry Gaza in our chests as memory and testament,

rebuilding what was destroyed within us in silence and resolve.

We search for a small light in this long night,

telling ourselves:

as long as there is breath within us, hope still lives.