My niece was playing last week and I couldn't stop watching her.
She had built a whole world out of nothing. A blanket was a mountain. A cup was a castle. She was narrating to herself in that half-whisper children use when they are completely, totally inside something. When the real world has dissolved and the one they've made is the only one that exists.
I sat there longer than I meant to.
There is something about watching a child play that makes you feel the weight of your own life lift, just slightly. Like remembering something you forgot you knew. My brother and I still do it. Grown adults, busy lives, real responsibilities. And still we find ourselves on the floor sometimes, laughing at something small and stupid and light. Because nothing sits lighter than that. Nothing in this whole heavy world comes close.
Play is not a small thing. It is the freest thing a human being ever does.
I keep coming back to that word. Free.
This week I saw four children in Gaza playing together. And the word free is not one I can use for what I saw.
One found a doll. Another found a small metal frame. They arranged themselves without being told. Because they already knew how. One at the front. One at the back. Two at the sides. Small hands gripping cold metal. And they walked. Slowly. The way their people walk when they are carrying their dead to their graves.
They learned that from real life. Not from a story. From standing at gravesides before they were old enough to understand what a grave means.
And then they went back to playing.
Because that instinct, to play, to make a world, to be free inside something small, it survives even this.
But what they made their world out of breaks my heart in two.
And I have not been able to stop thinking about it since.
To reach for play and find that even there, the grief has followed you in.
I think about their mothers watching. Recognising the procession in their children's small hands. Knowing exactly where they learned it. Loving them ferociously, while carrying the knowledge that something is already gone.
No mother should know that feeling. No child should give it to her.
I started this email in grief. But I want to end it in something else.
Those four children are still playing. Still finding each other. Still building worlds out of whatever they can find. That instinct, the one I watched in my niece, the one my brother and I still carry, nobody has managed to take that from them yet. And there is something in that worth holding onto.
I want their next game to be lighter. I want the next world they build to have more in it than what war has given them. I want them to feel, even once, that someone outside of Gaza saw them and chose them anyway.
That is what your gift does today.
It doesn't erase what they have seen. But it reaches them. And sometimes that is enough to remind a child that the world is still worth imagining inside.
Be that reminder.
For the small hands that should be building worlds, not carrying them,
Hafsa
