I wish she could hear me right now

I tried to hold on to you, to keep you from slipping away, but all I have left are memories.

I saw you again last night.

You were sitting on the steps, rolling grape leaves between your fingers. You had the pot balanced perfectly between your knees. The radio hummed behind you. A scratchy old song from Fairouz was playing, and you were humming along, off-key as always. The tea on the windowsill was growing cold.

I wanted to call out to you, but my throat locked and my feet wouldn’t move.

Suddenly the pot clattered to the ground. The radio cut to static. And the sky cracked open.

I woke up gasping, my fingers gripping the sheets, trying to hold on to something—your voice, your scent, the warmth of the kitchen before dawn. But there was nothing, only the kind of quiet that means something has been taken.

You never liked to sit still. You were always moving, always making something out of nothing. You stitched dresses with thread from a market stall. You turned old books into new stories for children who had none. You carved names into the backs of school desks, pressed the ink of poetry into walls.

In the mornings, you walked with the students, your feet scuffing the pavement. The boys with their ink-smudged fingers, the girls adjusting their hijabs in the window’s reflection. You laughed with the teachers who swapped stories between sips of cardamom coffee.

At noon, you argued politics with the fruit vendors. Your voice raised over the calls of “banadoura!” and “teen baladi!” You bought figs, pressed them gently between your fingers to test for ripeness.

In the afternoons, you sat with the doctors on hospital benches, watching them wipe the sweat from their brows, with exhaustion written into their bones. You traced the lines of their hands—hands that had pulled babies into the world, hands that had stitched together what shrapnel had torn apart.

And in the evenings, you waited for the fishermen whose boats were heavy with the scent of the sea and returned with their nets full of stories of how far they had to go, how little they could bring back.

You were beautifully and painfully everywhere.

Then came the winter that swallowed you whole.

The students never made it home that day. The teachers fell silent pre-class. The hospital corridors cracked with voices that spoke only in numbers. The fishermen’s boats came back empty, the water behind them dark, thick with things no one dared name.

The bakeries that spread the scent of sesame and thyme turned hollow. The streets, tangled with the rhythm of your feet, fell still.

I tried to reach you. I searched the places you used to be.

I ran to schools, but there were no desks, no ink stains, no scuffed shoes swinging under chairs. Only walls blown apart, chalkboards split in half, pages from textbooks curling in the wind.

I ran into hospitals, but the beds were stacked with people who no longer opened their eyes. The doctors sat against the walls with their hands still and their eyes vacant.

I ran across markets, but the fruit stalls were overturned, oranges crushed under boot prints and the blood soaked into the sand.

I called your name. I screamed it into the ruins and the dust and the silence.

I still haven’t heard back from you.

Now I am here. Somewhere far. The sky is calm and the streets are clean. No one looks over their shoulder before crossing the road. They tell me to be grateful. They tell me I am safe.

But I don’t know what safety is if you are not here.

They ask me where I am from. I try to explain but the words knot in my throat. I could tell them facts. Coordinates. Population figures. Casualty counts.

How do I tell them that you were the old men playing backgammon outside the mosque? That you were the scent of rain hitting dry earth? That you were the call to prayer weaving through the streets and mingling with the laughter of children kicking a tattered ball?

How do I tell them that you were the women baking bread before the sun rose, the writers scribbling against the weight of time, the journalists running toward the fire, the mothers tucking their children into bed, whispering, “It will be okay,” even when they knew it wouldn’t?

How do I tell them that you were my first home, my last refuge, my unfinished sentence?

That you are still here, in the salt of my skin, in the dust under my nails, in the grief lodged between my ribs.

That I hear you in the ambulance sirens that aren’t supposed to exist here. That I see you in the flicker of a candle when the power goes out. That I taste you in the first sip of bitter coffee before dawn.

That I am trying to keep you alive.

That I don’t know how.

That I don’t know if it is even possible.

That the world has buried you alive.

That they will stand over your grave and call it collateral.

That they will erase your name from maps and your stories from history and tell me to move on and start over

That I spent nights trying to speak to the world while you ached, not out of some relentless professionalism, but because my love for you burned fiercer than the metal and glass still buried in my back from the day before.

But I will whisper your name into the wind until it reaches the places they locked you out of. I will slip your stories between the cracks of their silence and stitch them into the seams of a world that pretends you never existed.

They will redraw maps, wipe the blood from their hands, call you a memory.

I know you are still there, breathing in the dust that refuses to settle. I hear you in the echo of the waves that still crash against a shore no one can walk anymore.

You are the embers buried beneath the ruin. You are the flicker beneath the ash and the heat beneath the rubble.

I know you are waiting.

And I know that when you rise—and you will rise—they will call it a miracle.

But I will call it what it is.

Home, coming back to life.