A Summary of Stories that can’t be Summarized!

I don’t know what I should name this. Is this a diary, or is it a summary of stories that can’t be summarized?

Who said that words can describe what we have been living through?

There are horrible stories you’re not ready to hear; stories we thought only happened in the movies we watched—but this time, we were the victims in the film!

Everyone in this goddamn world was watching us, but no one took a real action! We were living in one of the highest population densities in the world, under gunfire, bombs, rockets, and flare bombs, yet to the world, it was as if nothing was happening. I saw homelessness, loss, confusion, and hesitation in the eyes around me. Our eyes were talking on our behalf.

But if I start writing about what was happening, where should I begin? When I found out my best friend had died along with her entire husband’s family while I kept calling her daily, not knowing she was already gone? Or should I start when half of my family was forced to flee to the unknown—to southern Gaza—where all we knew was that they had to leave? No, maybe I should start when we learned that my sister’s apartment had been bombed and she still hadn’t paid off the financial costs of the apartment. Or when we were under bombardment, certain we wouldn’t survive? No, I should start when my pregnant sister had to walk kilometers without rest, without even daring to look back, or…........

Do you think this is all that was happening?!

We weren’t searching for food or water, as some claim—we were searching for peace, which no longer existed. The peace, in my opinion, was sitting among my family—I mean half of my family, because half of my family was in the south and the other half in the north of Gaza! We didn’t care about what the news said about us; it was all nonsense. We were asking ourselves, will this genocide end? We did not have any hope in. But if it actually ended, it would end just in the ground. Do you think it would end with who had lost his family, to who had lost his home, to who had lost everything? Once, I tried to escape my reality by losing myself in Radwa Ashour’s novel Al-Tantouriya, but I failed—the same horrors were happening in the book! Since 1948, we’ve been living the same nightmare, the same crimes, the same victims!

Wait—who am I writing to? And what am I waiting for?

No one cares.

Basmala