Since I joined this work, I have not known a single day that didn't weigh something.
I carry myself home every evening like something that has been wrung out. The images follow me. The reports follow me. The children follow me. And every night I make the same promise. Tonight I rest. Tonight I ask nothing of myself. Tonight I just breathe.
Last night I put on an animated film and broke that promise within ten minutes.
A little girl whispers for her mother. Just a whisper. Barely sound at all. Her brother holds her because there are no words left that could help. He rocks her gently in the silence of someone who knows the answer and cannot say it.
Somewhere in Gaza tonight a little girl is doing the same thing. Except her mother is under rubble. And there is nobody rocking her. And the whisper just goes and goes into the dark until she runs out of breath or falls asleep, whichever comes first.
The little girl in the film starves. And in her very last hours, when her body has nothing left to give her, her mind does the most heartbreaking thing a mind can do. It tries to save her. She picks up a stone and her eyes fill with relief because it is not a stone anymore. It is food. It is something sweet and real and finally here.
She dies like that. Reaching. Smiling. Believing.
I think about the children in Gaza who chew their mother's hijab in the dark because it still carries her smell and that is the closest thing to her they have left. Who gnaw cardboard boiled soft and call it cake and clap because pretending is the only thing that doesn't hurt. Who nudge their dead father's chest looking for something that will never come, swatting flies away with hands too small to be doing any of this.
One child is a cartoon.
The others are alive right now and I need you to feel the full weight of that word. Alive. Barely. Holding on by something thinner than thread.
The little girl in the film finds fireflies and when they die she buries them. Small hands pressing gently into the dirt, her face serious and tender, a child who has learned that the things we love deserve somewhere to go.
She practiced grief on something small and glowing before the real losses came for her.
In Gaza the children never get to practice.
A little girl dragged a blanket over her sister who hadn't moved since the missile came. She saved her the bigger half of an imaginary sandwich and waited. Her sister didn't wake up. She sat there in the silence and ate both halves alone and I cannot stop thinking about what that silence sounded like. What it feels like to be that small and that alone with something that large.
I sat in the dark after the film ended and I could not move.
Because I was not watching 1945. I was watching tonight. I was watching every image I have spent a year trying to survive, played back to me in animation, as if history had simply stopped trying to warn us and decided to just show us the same thing on a loop until we finally break open and do something.
And now the people who were inside Gaza witnessing it, who refused to let it happen in complete darkness, who carried things through when every door was closing, they are being removed. Laws passed. Doors shut. The room emptied so that what comes next happens the way that little girl died.
Quietly.
With nobody left to see it.
That thing happening in your chest right now.
That is not sadness. Sadness passes. That is something older and truer than sadness. That is the part of you that still knows what a child's life is worth. That still recognises the sound of a whisper going unanswered in the dark.
Do not let it close before you act.
Because she is still there. Still reaching. Still holding a stone that her breaking mind is trying to turn into something sweet.
Be the thing that is actually there.
For every tiny hand that had to pat down dirt on a grave too soon,
Hafsa
