Thursday 19/10/2023

Death is coming closer, signs of life are disappearing, my memory is almost full and I’m close to forgetting my friend’s faces, the streets that we walked, we used to get in the car and head downtown to watch the shops and people. Everything has been destroyed, there aren't any streets left to walk, the mosques and churches were destroyed. 

At 11pm, instead of smelling the scent of flowers outside of the house, we smell ashes and white phosphorus. Two days ago, we got news that our house was partially destroyed, today we received news that it was fully destroyed. We don't know how true this is but we saw on the news that Shajaeieh has become a ghost town as was described.

The house, the balcony that i sleep on overlooking the neighbor’s garden, where i hung out with my friends till dawn, the sound of the neighbors staying up - the place that has witnessed all my grief, where I wrote my fingers dry, the turquoise couches I got last month, my mother’s taste in picking out the furniture, the new tiles my dad installed last month and our yelling at each other, whenever a friend came to the balcony they’d comment “who even paints the walls black” - now the whole house is black with soot.