Tuesday 10/10/2023

At ten o'clock at night, my brother and I were lying on the ground by the house steps, with the door slightly open to let in a bit of fresh air in, just so we could feel a little more alive. Ten o’clock in Gaza meant, the intensity of shelling was on the rise, and the sounds were louder. 

We also heard distant screams, perhaps from a civilian house that had been bombed or those were people fleeing their homes. They were fleeing from one house to the street to another house, perhaps to be bombed later…

I muttered to myself quietly, how does the world understand the language of aggression without experiencing it? I remembered during the 2014 aggression when a foreign delegation came to Gaza, and friends began talking to them about the brutality of the sounds we heard and the horror of death and bloodshed. 

But they couldn't imagine it. That's when my friend started talking about her fear of going to the bathroom during the war and her fear for her cat's life due to the bombing. That's when the delegation started paying more attention and feeling the cruelty of the aggression.

It meant to me that the world won't understand me when I speak the language of the pain the sound of the pain. Death and pain have their own standards for them as well.

For eight months, I've been trying to save money to travel and complete my master's degree to secure a better future for me and my family. In those eight months, I managed to save only $500. 

In one day, everything changed, and my dream of traveling and studying shifted from my heart to the throes of death. My biggest dream now is to survive this aggression. In one day, everything changed, I started using the money I was saving for my studies, because we were evacuated from our home, and it's as if the dream that I had is now fading, will it stay a dream?

This world is cruel with all its laws because the feeling of others' pain has its legal standards too. You must master these standards to tell people that in this region, there is hope that we are trying to nurture, but you are killing that hope in us.

If you want to redefine pain in accordance with your standards, it means that you are stripping yourselves of your humanity and following the modern civilization that always tries to mold people into plastic molds.