Aftermath

It’s like there’s a hole in my chest that no one warned me about, and every day it widens just a little more. Some days I pretend I don’t notice it, pretend I’m stronger than this weight that never leaves me. But then something small ..a memory, a smell, a thought hits me out of nowhere, and suddenly I’m back in that moment again, the moment everything was taken. Not lost. Taken. Ripped. Cut out. Stolen. That damn strike didn’t just hit a place, it hit my life. It hit my future. It hit everything I was supposed to still have.

And the world keeps going like nothing happened, like I didn’t watch my entire sense of “home” collapse into smoke and silence. People talk, laugh, breathe, live ... and I’m standing there with this invisible wound no one else can see.

I miss my family so much my bones hurt. Not metaphorically ..no ..it’s like the ache settled into my skeleton and decided to stay. My siblings’ voices echo inside me like ghosts. I can hear them sometimes, the way they laughed, the way they complained, the way they made the house feel alive. That noise was life. And now the silence is so loud it rings in my ears.

I miss my mother’s warmth, her presence, the way she could look at me once and somehow know everything I was afraid to say. I miss my father’s steady calm, the kind that made the world feel less hostile. And now I feel like a tree pulled out of the ground violently, roots dangling, dirt falling off, nothing to hold onto. Just floating. Drifting. Pretending I’m fine while something inside me is screaming.

And the anger… the anger is its own creature. Dark. Heavy. Bitter. It sits behind my ribs and claws its way upward, burning, tightening, pressing. Angry at the strike. Angry at fate. Angry at the world. Angry that I can’t go back in time and hold on to them harder. Angry that I wasn’t given a choice. Angry that everything can vanish in a heartbeat and there’s nothing you can do but watch your life collapse like a fragile building.

I hate how missing them feels like swallowing glass. I hate how some nights I lie awake and my mind replays memories that feel both precious and poisonous. I hate how no matter how far I run, the pain runs faster. I hate how the homesickness is not for a place but for people, for voices, for warmth, for a life I can’t get back. I hate how grief becomes something you carry in your mouth, in your lungs, in your heartbeat. Something that never leaves, just changes shape.

Sometimes it feels like I’m living in the aftermath of a storm that never ends. The sky above me is always that strange color, not night, not day, just the shade of things that can’t be undone. And I’m tired. Tired in that deep, bone-level way that sleep doesn’t fix. Tired of pretending I’m okay. Tired of holding all this grief alone. Tired of feeling like the child version of me is still somewhere inside, crying for a home that doesn’t exist anymore.

You wake up some mornings and you don’t even know how you managed to open your eyes. You sit there thinking, How am I still here? How am I still moving? How did I survive when everything else didn’t? And the guilt hits you like a wave that pulls you under, fills your lungs with that thick, choking question: Why me? Why am I the one left?

Surviving alone isn’t strength.

And people say, “You’re strong,” like it’s a compliment, but they don’t understand what that kind of strength costs. They don’t understand how surviving alone means learning to stitch wounds with shaking hands, wiping your own tears, holding yourself upright when the world feels like it’s collapsing again and again. They don’t understand how lonely it is to have no witness to your pain. How lonely it is to cry into a room that doesn’t answer back.

Some days I swear the grief sits so heavy in my chest I can’t tell where my heart ends and the pain begins. It feels fused together, welded by the heat of that airstrike that changed everything in a single impossible second. I replay it even when I don’t want to, even when I’m begging my mind for silence. The blast, the shock, the tearing away, it’s like the universe reached into my life with both hands and pulled out everything that mattered.

And it replays,

It replays,

Over &

Over &

Over &

Over..

..

.