My little brother and I have a bedtime ritual.
Every night, no matter how the day has been, we do a little vlog sign off together. Just us. We say goodbye to an invisible camera the way people end vlogs, wrapping up the day like it was content worth watching. We go “bye friends” to the camera. And then we close our bedroom doors.
We do it even when I am away from home. We find a way.
It is the most specific, private, completely our thing. The kind of ritual that exists only between two people who grew up in the same house and invented a language nobody else speaks.
My little brother orbits me.
He asks me to do his hair before school. Waits very seriously for my verdict on his outfit. Tells me about everything he is learning with the urgency of someone who needs me to know it the moment he knows it. He is my favourite person to be orbited by.
I have been thinking about siblings in Gaza.
They orbit each other too. The same way. The same gravity, the same specific love that exists only between people who grew up in the same house.
But their bedtime ritual is different from mine.
At night, before they sleep, Gaza's children write their names on their arms.
On their legs. On their small bodies. The older siblings help the younger ones, carefully, making sure nothing is missed. Making sure the writing is clear. Making sure that if the bomb comes tonight and the bodies are found in pieces, there will be something to read. Something that says this one had a name. This one was someone's little brother. Someone's whole orbit.
They do not write if.
They write their names because when is a fact they have already accepted.
And then they go to sleep.
I think about my brother's hair.
The way he stands in front of me in the morning, waiting. The complete, uncomplicated trust that I will do it right. That my hands on his head mean something safe and ordinary and Tuesday.
I think about an older sister in Gaza doing her little brother's hair in the morning. The same trust. The same orbit. The same hands. And then at night those same hands writing his name on his arm in permanent marker so the morning will know who he was if the night takes him.
Same hands.
Same love.
Completely different world.
Sibling love is the same everywhere.
The teasing and the loyalty and the telling each other everything. The way a younger sibling thinks the older one hung the moon. The way the older one would do anything, actually anything, to keep the younger one safe.
Gaza's older siblings know that feeling.
They just express it with a marker before bed.
Think about your sibling tonight. Or the person who that is for you. The one who orbits you. The one whose excitement about small things you receive because receiving it is one of the best parts of your day.
Think about what it would mean to love that person the way Gaza's children love each other.
Those children deserve a world where the last thing an older sibling does before bed is not write a younger one's name on their arm.
They deserve the vlog sign off.
The invisible camera.
The closed bedroom doors.
The ordinary, private, completely their ritual of two people who grew up in the same house and invented a language nobody else speaks.
Give them that world.
Or at least give them today inside it.
For my little brother, and every sibling who deserves to just say goodnight,
Hafsa