Fragments.

I remember Gaza before I knew it would become a memory.

Not the Gaza people put into photographs.

Not the sea and the postcards and the sunsets.

I mean the "ordinary" Gaza. (Yet it was never ordinary, was it?)

The loud Gaza.

The stubborn Gaza.

The Gaza that woke before the sun and somehow still found a way to laugh.

I remember streets that were crowded with voices.

Vendors calling out.

Children running between people’s legs.

Doors left open.

Neighbors shouting to one another from balconies.

The smell of bread drifting through the morning.

Coffee.

Bread.

Salt from the sea.

Everything was close.

People were close.

Life was always spilling into someone else’s life.

A mother yelling for her children.

A grandmother sitting outside.

Someone fixing a car with the entire neighborhood offering advice.

Someone playing music too loudly.

Someone laughing at something stupid.

And somehow, even with everything we knew, there was still this stubborn belief that tomorrow would resemble today.

That is what I miss most.

Not safety.

Certainty.

The ordinary certainty that tomorrow would come and still look like home.

Now I have fragments.

A piece of a wall.

A photograph with half the faces still visible.

A kitchen I can remember better than I can remember my own reflection.

A name.

A voice.

A smell.

A child's shoe.

A piece of wallpaper.

The strange thing about destruction is that it doesn't erase everything.

It leaves just enough behind to torture you.

One chair standing.

One window.

One cupboard.

One toy beneath the dust.

One photograph that somehow survived when the people inside it didn't.

Fragments are cruel.

Because a whole ruin is easier to understand.

But a fragment?

A fragment makes you imagine the rest.

I see a broken staircase and remember who used to run up it.

I see a doorway and remember who used to call my name from the other side.

I see a kitchen and remember my mother's hands.

I see children walking and remember my siblings.

I hear laughter and my heart turns toward it before I remember.

Gaza now feels like that too.

Fragments of what it was.

Buildings without rooms.

Rooms without families.

Streets without the people who gave them meaning.

The sea is still there.

The sky is still there.

The sun still rises over everything.

And somehow that almost makes it worse.

Because the world continues its routines above a place that has lost so much of its own.

Morning still comes.

People still search.

Mothers still call names.

Children still wake up.

Bread still matters.

Water still matters.

A blanket matters.

A doorway matters.

A place to sleep matters.

Everything ordinary has become enormous.

I think that is what war does.

It takes the things you never thought to be grateful for and teaches you their value after they are gone.

Home becomes a photograph.

Family becomes a voice in your head.

A bedroom becomes four walls you can reconstruct perfectly in memory.

A mother's embrace becomes something you feel only when you close your eyes.

And Gaza becomes both a place and a wound.

I don't know how to describe the now without betraying the before.

Because Gaza is not only the rubble.

It is also everything that existed before the rubble.

The jokes.

The arguments.

The weddings.

The Eid mornings.

The crowded tables.

The fishermen.

The bakeries.

The children.

The old men drinking coffee.

The women calling each other from across the street.

The sea.

The stubbornness.

The warmth.

The noise.

All of it is still there somewhere.

Buried beneath the fragments.

And maybe that is why I cannot stop remembering.

Because if I remember only what was destroyed, then destruction gets the final word.

So I remember the loudness.

I remember the ridiculousness.

I remember how alive it was.

I remember my family inside it.

I remember my name being called.

I remember home.

And then I look around at what remains.

Silence.

Dust.

Unknown.

And me.

Standing somewhere between the Gaza I remember and the Gaza I am still trying to understand.

Carrying fragments in both hands.

Too afraid to drop them.

Too tired to carry them.

Still carrying them anyway.

.

.

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Aura

12:16 am

22 Aug, 2026