I am still here
For us, for me, my family, the other families, for those who have survived the kilinig: for-now, this endless GENOCIDE does not end with the body. It begins after it. It seeps into the heart and mind, settles deep within our exhausted humanity, our fragile emotions, and minds stretched far beyond their limits.
It was a genocide of everything within us; of all we were born with: our love, our sense of belonging, and everything Gaza taught us; patience, dignity, and resilience. It was something, that drained every last part of us: our emotions, our dreams, our memories, even the last flicker of hope we held for life. It exhausted us to the bone, to the very last spark of light inside us. It was a war on our existence, on our humanity, on everything that made us who we are.
It lives in our desperate, hopeless attempts to connect with a world that refuses to hear us, or chooses not to. All the cries for help, all the screaming: none of it was ever enough to awaken this world's conscience.
The sheer repetition of our massacres has numbed the world. Thousands upon thousands of lives taken, so often, that it has become routine, normalized. To some, it now seems ordinary, even acceptable as long as it doesn't reach their homes or disturb their children's sleep.
The genocide that hasn't yet spilledour blood has already robbed us of something even greater: The ability to feel like others do. The ability to be normal. To Live without constantly having to prove that we deserve to. To reassure the ones who love us that they won't lose us; even when we're not sure ourselves.
It has taken from us the peace of certainty, and replaced it with a quiet, constant dread. A life where even love is laced with fear. It has reduced us to permanent victims, pitied when we never asked for pity, and burdened with the constant need to prove we are worthy of life, worthy of dignity As if surviving death is a crime that must be explained.
Our awareness has been so disfigured that even life; in its simplicity,inits absurdity, feels beyond our grasp, like a crueljoke that no longer amuses, but only mocks us. Our inner worlds have become silent slaughterhouses,where every moment of peace, every potential for joy, is butchered before it's even born.
We suffer in silence. And even when we scream; with all the pain we carry, no one truly hears. No one touches the pain asit is, as we deserve it to be felt. We feel everything, but no one truly, fully, feels us. No one can understand the depth of our pain the Way we do, no matter how hard they try. We are islands, isolated in our suffering, unable to bridge the distance that separates our hearts from theirs.
So we remain suspended between silence and screaming. between fury and helplessness, searching only for someone who will truly understand. But more often than not, we find no one. We remain trapped, in our voices, in our silence. Even as Gaza stands at the center of the world's gaze, at the heart of its awareness Gazans remain utterly alone.
We have absorbed so much pain that our faces and bodies now pulse withit; so visibly that no one who sees us can miss it, or fail to feel it. We are all the same; we are you. But weare here, and you are there. To us, you are like us, only with less pain and morelife There is no shame in having morelife; that is natural. And there is no shame in having more pain; thatis simply our reality.
We carry our pain not just in silence, but with dignity. We look at those who caused it with contempt and disgust; not from weakness. but because they have lost their humanity. They are not human; ony disfigured creatures, trying to destroy what it means to be human.
And we; despite all that has been forced upon us, still know how to love, how to feel, how to suffer. And that, in itself, is a VICTORY.
This is what genocide does; not just to bodies, but to hearts, to dreams, to the very meaning of life. These are the words of survival written in pain, carried in silence, and spoken on behalf of those who still live, and those who no longer can.
Read this. Feel this. Let it reach the part of you the world has numbed. Let it touch you where the world has gone numb. Share it with someone you thought had gone numb to our suffering ; and give hope one more chance.
