“Time has stopped at home, in Gaza”: Palestinian woman who escaped the hell of war tells

“With indescribable pain, I find myself obliged to create my own alphabet; a new alphabet, a survivor’s alphabet. An alphabet that no longer resembles any other, because all the letters of the alphabet did not allow me to express my suffering. My letters are capable of creating powerful, living, sometimes even dead words. They will only give strong, very strong sentences like: I feel a bomb of contradictory emotions inside me. Anger, guilt, grief, nostalgia, survivor joy, oppression and a lot of sadness.

I carry an irresistible nostalgia for my life before. In truth, I miss my house by the sea in Gaza, I miss the smell of my country, I miss that serenity that embraces me while walking the streets of my city.

The Gaza Strip has always been presented as a large open-air prison. Today, I find myself outside this prison but still handcuffed, I can’t even escape, I can’t even fly… I still remain a prisoner… a prisoner of my thoughts, of Gaza and of this atrocious genocide which does not end.

Time flies but, deep inside, time has stopped at home, in Gaza. Will I ever be able to overcome these emotions? How will I be able to continue my life seeing all this oppression against my compatriots?

How will I rebuild myself seeing the destruction everywhere in my country? How can I eat and drink well knowing that my family and loved ones are facing famine in Gaza?

It’s selfish, it’s unfair, isn’t it? How will I plan my future while losing all possibilities of perspective? Because everything collapsed. I remember myself less sensitive, more joyful, less disturbed, more balanced!

My tears are on alert, waiting for the call of a memory, a horrible memory of the war or a sweet memory of the good days in my homeland. I find myself with a new version of myself, I can no longer find my feet, everything is changed; my dreams, my plans, my routine, my life. Sometimes I repeat to myself: “Don’t exaggerate. You’re lucky, you’re breathing, you’re not there anymore. » But my mind stayed there.

I am stuck in an “in-between” that exhausts me, in the middle of the path. Because I no longer enjoy the pleasure of discovering the future and I find myself stuck, unable to erase the atrocity of what I experienced, and even less to continue my journey. Starting over when you have neither the desire nor the passion to start again is very difficult.

I lose all confidence in the world except in the lively gaze of my children who love life and who force me to overcome it all. I have always loved traveling, escaping, discovering the world. But never like this. Not because of the war, not out of compulsion. I feel uprooted and it’s not easy because leaving home is the bitterest thing you can ever taste in your entire life…”