When my friends asked me what I want to do next year, I said: "If I'm still alive, maybe I'll get married, or travel abroad, or study for a master's." I did not stop at the beginning of the sentence. In Gaza we have grown used to putting conditions in front of the future. We say: if we stay alive, if things calm down, if the crossing opens, if the siege is lifted, if we return home. Then we carry on talking as though the future were something that really exists, waiting for us somewhere. Next year was never guaranteed, but I never knew how a person could think about it without taking their own death into account.
Before the last war, I thought of my life as something that concerned me.
My family was not absent from my life, but it was not its center.
And that is natural.
In your twenties, a person usually thinks about how to leave their family's home, not how to stay inside it. As a family, our presence was scattered between studies, the club, friends, and the phone. I know our disagreements, the traits I wish my siblings would change, and I know well what they love and what annoys them.
Then the war came and did what wars do to the things we think are fixed: it rearranged them or distorted them. We were together all the time. None of us had our own day anymore, or our small errands. We shared the house, the fear, and the waiting until we began to feel stifled by one another, and then stifled by ourselves.
At first we thought that, as a family, we were failing at the very first thing we were supposed to succeed at: holding each other. But the truth is we did not know how to do it. We were not used to seeing each other this afraid, this exhausted, and with no space at all to withdraw.
I discovered then that family is not one single thing.
It can be a burden and a consolation at the same time.
You can suffocate because you cannot escape it, and then everything terrifies you because you cannot imagine surviving without it.
During the war, my brother stepping out of the house was enough to change my day. If bombing happened while he was outside, I stayed on pins and needles until he came back. And if he was late, lateness was no longer lateness; it became a possibility: will I see him again? At that moment, time does nothing but stretch. And during displacement, I was afraid that as we moved we would lose one of the little ones, that we would arrive somewhere and one of us would not, that I would survive because I was the luckiest and spend my life knowing that my survival meant leaving someone I love behind.
For the first time the question was not: how do I survive?
But: how do we survive?
And the difference between the two questions is bigger than it seems.
In those days I came to know my siblings as I never had before: what makes them laugh, how their moods change, what they cannot bear. I saw their grief for friends who were martyred, and for others who were arrested or displaced. It was heavy to see my loved ones afraid, shattered, and defeated; but we were together, and that was enough, as we tried to understand each other's needs and to get through another day without catastrophe. Family took on a different meaning, one beyond my emotional capacity to picture.
When I read Szymborska's "The End and the Beginning," I recognize something of our life in the rubble that must be cleared, and in her words:
[Excerpt from Wisława Szymborska's poem "The End and the Beginning," quoted in Arabic translation in the original. Not translated here for copyright reasons; an official English translation of the poem can be inserted at this point.]
Here I am still standing, because the poem begins after the war, and we have not reached that distance.
This war did not come alone. I have lived through four wars since my childhood in Gaza, with accumulated crises between them, and each time my ability to imagine what would come grew narrower. The earlier wars left the remains of a dream, and the last war crushed them, until the future came to resemble fantasy. So I am not only searching for what my future will be; I want the very ability to dream to return to me. And so I now have two futures: the future I want, and the future I am only trying to learn what it looks like; because when I think of the future as a future, I do not know what will happen to us in years to come. The future is that we have the right to imagine it in the first place. To say: I will live here, I will build a house here, I will plant a tree here, my children will grow up here. To treat the coming years as years that could be ours. We do not yet have that right, and perhaps that is why writing about the future has become important to me.
I want to get my imagination back.
I want to be able to say "tomorrow" and picture myself as part of it without attaching a condition.
I want a future that may sound trivial when I say it: that my mother, my father, and my siblings are alive; that we eat food we choose, not food imposed on us. That my siblings go out and I carry on with my day without spending all of it wondering whether they will come back safe.
To own land, or plant a tree and watch it grow.
To have a home we return to.
To say: my children will grow up here.
To turn on the tap and have water come out.
For the lamp to light.
To get in a car on the road and arrive.
To lift my head to the sky and not have my first thought be: is there a warplane? An airstrike?
I want the things we do not usually write about because they are not dreams; we call them life.
To think about building a family somewhere... Speaking of family, they say love presses on us in wartime, and now I feel that family presses on me more than anything else. I do not know whether my wish to start a family is nature, a survival instinct, or fear of loneliness.
Maybe both?! Because I cannot yet separate them.
Sometimes I think I want a family because I love the idea of family,
and sometimes I suspect I want one because I do not want to be alone in another war to come,
if I am still alive, of course.
The sentence I do not know how to say in a lighter way.
But the future as many people live it in the present, I do not know its full picture; the wars have cut my imagination many times.
My friends still ask me about next year, and I still begin my answer with a condition. But it is no longer "if I'm still alive." It has become: if we live. And I dream of a day when I open that door and find the others have arrived too.
And I think this small sentence is all I have left of what our future looks like.
