Somewhere in Gaza,
There is a wedding dress that has been worn by more than a dozen women.
It gets passed between tents. Washed by hand, mended where it tore, taken in for a girl thinner than the last one which, these days, she always is.
They are still getting married. In tents, in the dust, with nothing.
And on the morning of it, she gets ready. Someone does her hair. Someone kneels with a bit of kohl and draws her eyes. Someone finds henna and holds her hands and makes the pattern, slowly, the way it has always been done.
There's often no mirror.
So she has to trust the faces of the women looking at her.
And at some point that morning, someone will nearly say her mother's name and stop. Because the woman who should have been doing her hair isn't there, and everyone in that tent knows it, and they carry on anyway because the only kindness left is to make her feel like a bride.
She will get married with half the people missing who should have been in the room.
And she will still want to look beautiful.
But the weddings are the rare days.
It's the ordinary ones that get me.
Girls sitting outside tents in the afternoon braiding each other's hair, for nothing, for no occasion, because it's what girls do.
A woman plucking her eyebrows with no mirror and a borrowed pair of tweezers.
A barber who set up in the rubble with one chair and a pair of scissors, and a line of men waiting their turn.
A lipstick someone has had for two years, worn down to almost nothing, saved for the days that matter.
Someone asking a friend to take a photo of her, and checking it, and asking her to take another.
Because getting ready is something you do for later.
Nobody lines their eyes for a day they've given up on.
You do your hair because you believe there'll be an afternoon, and people in it, and a reason to be looked at. It's a small private bet that the next few hours are worth showing up for.
Every woman doing that in Gaza is betting there's a tomorrow, in a place built to prove to her there isn't.And here is the part I can't put down.
Every photograph you have ever seen of a woman from Gaza is of the worst moment of her life.Screaming. Carrying a body. Grey with dust. On the floor of a hospital corridor.
That's the entire visual record. Three years of it.
Think about that from her side. The single image the world holds of you is you at your most destroyed hair everywhere, face swollen, caught at the exact moment you lost everything.
She would hate it.
Any of us would. There isn't a woman alive who'd choose that photo.
And there's no other one, because nobody came to photograph her at a wedding, or laughing outside her tent, or on the afternoon somebody did her hair properly and she felt good.
They have been beautiful this entire time. No one was there for it.
So we've been handed a version of them made only of grief, and it isn't true. They are not a people who have only ever suffered. They are a people still doing each other's hair in a war.
That instinct cannot be bombed out of anyone.
You can take the house, the school, the hospital, the husband and a woman will still sit another woman down and fix her hair, because that's what you do for someone you love.
So when you picture Gaza this week, don't only picture the dust.
Picture her the morning of her wedding. Borrowed dress, no mirror, surrounded by women telling her she's beautiful and meaning it.
That's who's out there. People still, against all of it, getting ready.
Let's help them get to the day.
For the dress, and every woman who's worn it,
Hafsa