4 April 2025
Homeless
While sitting on a seashore other than the Mediterranean–not mine–I try to discover what remains of me in a place that doesn’t recognise me, in a cruel world that no longer holds space for my home. I sit in the unfamiliar, trying to breathe through the suffocating ache of being homeless, of having no home, of knowing that what once grounded me has been turned to bloody rubble.
I scroll through the news of my home—what used to be my reality—watching familiar skies, raining rockets, bodies pulled from the rubble, children whose names I’ll never know but feel as my own children, whose laughter I’ll never hear and whose cry was the last I heard of them. People—my people—hunted like shadows. And I ask myself: how am I still breathing? How dare I be alive when so many are not?
Is this unhealing pain in my chest and this relentless guilt enough to honour them? Is watching every video until my eyes burn and sob until there’s nothing left but silence in my bones enough? Is praying until words blur into pleas and until hope feels like a betrayal enough? I wrote a master’s thesis calling for the world to act, to care, to stop the genocide. I drafted a policy paper urging accountability, outreach, and resistance but no sentence, no advocacy, can resuscitate a beheaded child.
Still, people tell me, “Focus on yourself. You have a future. Life goes on”. But what kind of life grows from the ashes of mass graves? From the bones of children I’ll never be able to forget? If I bury my pain to chase my dreams, am I betraying my blood? My people? Myself?
They call us humans. I studied Human Rights and Democracy, I work in the humanitarian field, and I dream of defending rights—of being a human rights defender. But what does that term mean when humans are being blown apart while the world turns away? When pain becomes the language we inherit? Do rights still exist when mothers clutch their dead infants in silence because screaming won’t bring them back?
Guilt trips create a sense of agony in everything we do: sleeping, eating, and showering, and also in the emails I send, the work I do, the goals I set myself. All haunted. All shadowed by a river of blood, cut-out limbs, and beheaded babies.
And then comes the whisper, quiet but steady: I want the world to explode. To end.
Not out of hatred, but because maybe only then will my guilt die too. Maybe only then will I stop carrying the unbearable weight of limbs torn from tiny bodies, of families incinerated, of voices silenced forever.
But even now, even after spilling all these words, I know what I feel is nothing. It is nothing compared to what my people are enduring every hour, every breath.
Kos Em Israel… By Salma Hossam Almadhoun