Lately, I’ve been carrying a feeling I can’t shake.
It’s the sense that years don’t really end.
They add up.
Instead of closing a chapter, we carry another layer of loss into the next year.
Gaza.
Sudan.
Places where violence no longer shocks because it never stops.
Children starved behind borders meant to erase them.
Families killed while the world debates what to call it.
Entire communities disappearing as another year quietly passes.
I keep wondering when this started to feel familiar.
When genocide stopped feeling like a warning from history and started feeling like something we ignore because there’s always another story underneath.
And still, time keeps marching forward, indifferent to the damage left behind.
Like a slow darkness coming in.
Not sudden. Not loud. Just always there.
It weighs on me that Gaza is being dragged into another year of this.
The thought of children growing up without ever stepping outside it.
Without remembering a time before walls, before hunger, before fear.
And Sudan doesn’t haunt me because of the numbers.
It’s the lack of them.
The lives that disappear without being counted.
The grief that never gets named.
And what terrifies me is how easily we adapt to it.
How suffering goes on so long that the world stops reacting
and starts adjusting.
That’s the real danger.
And yet, this is the part that keeps me from giving up.
I keep seeing moments that don’t fit the story of collapse.
People who refuse to go numb.
Who don’t wait for permission to care.
Who show up even when it costs them something.
I see aid reaching places it was never meant to reach.
I see families surviving because someone they’ll never meet decided they mattered.
Again and again, I’m reminded that the future isn’t decided by cruelty alone.
It’s still being fought for.
And as long as there are people willing to stand in the middle of all this pain
to give, to stay, to witness
the story doesn’t end where it’s meant to.
The darkness is loud. But it isn’t finished.
With grief for what’s been lost, and resolve for what still can be protected,
Hafsa