I am sick today.
Not seriously. Just the kind of sick that peels all your defences away and leaves you feeling about six years old. Everything is too close to the surface. My eyes keep welling up at nothing. And I have this ache, this specific childish ache, that I have not felt this strongly in years.
I just want to go home.
To my bed. The one that is mine, in the room that is mine, with the exact weight of the blanket I know and the softness of the pillow that has learned the shape of my head over a thousand nights. I want to pull the covers up over my shoulder and feel that particular heaviness settle over me, the one that says you can stop now, you are safe, nothing can reach you here.
I want to hear the birds outside. That ordinary morning sound they make, completely indifferent to me, going about their small business the way they always have. I want the sun coming through my window, filtered through the leaves of the tree outside, that dappled light moving gently across the wall. The light that has always meant the same thing to me. That it is morning. That I am home. That the day will ask nothing of me until I am ready.
That is the entire shape of my longing today. A bed. A blanket. Birdsong. Light through leaves. The smell of my own room. The specific safety of a place that is mine.
And lying here, wanting those small things so much it hurts, I started thinking about Gaza's children.
I wonder if they get homesick.
Not for a country. For a bed. The specific one that was theirs before everything changed. The blanket they knew by touch in the dark. The pillow that had learned the shape of their head. The corner of the room where their things were, arranged the way they liked them, the small private kingdom every child builds out of whatever they are given.
I wonder if the missing rushes in during the quiet.
Because that is when it comes. Not in the loudest moments. In the still ones. When the bombs go quiet for a while and the body relaxes half an inch and suddenly there is room for everything you have been too afraid to feel. That is when homesickness arrives. In the gap. In the pause. When there is finally nothing to brace against and the grief finally has somewhere to go.
I wonder if a child in Gaza lies in whatever they are lying in now, a tent, a shelter, a stranger's floor, the corner of a building that used to be something else, and remembers their real bed.
The one from before.
I wonder if they close their eyes and try to build it again in their mind. The exact weight of the blanket. The exact softness of the pillow. The exact sound of their own home breathing around them at night. I wonder if they can still remember it clearly, or if it is starting to go soft at the edges the way memories do when the thing itself is gone and there is nothing left to keep the memory sharp.
I wonder if they miss the birds. If there were birds. If they remember what an ordinary morning sounded like before mornings became something to be survived.
I keep thinking about the Sunday mornings.
Every child has them. The slow ones. Where nobody makes you get up and you drift in and out of sleep in the specific safety of a home that is quiet because everyone in it is resting, not because everyone in it is holding their breath. The smell of something cooking in another room. The muffled sound of your family being alive and nearby and completely unbothered. The knowledge, so deep you never even think about it, that you are safe and small and held by a place that expects nothing from you.
That is home. Not the walls. That feeling.
Gaza's children had that once. Every single one of them. A bed. A blanket. A family alive in the next room. Light through a window they knew by heart.
And then it was gone. Not slowly. All at once. The bed under rubble. The room erased. The window and the wall it was set into and, for too many of them, the family that used to be alive and nearby.
They are homesick for a place that no longer exists.
I do not have a word for that kind of grief. Homesickness assumes there is a home to be sick for. Theirs has been taken. The longing has nowhere to land.
I get to go home when I am better.
That is the whole difference between my longing and theirs. Mine has an ending. In a few days I will be well and I will be in my own bed under my own blanket, birds outside, light through the leaves, and this feeling will pass the way small sadnesses pass.
Theirs does not end. The home they ache for is not waiting for them to recover. And so the missing just becomes part of who they are. A child carrying a homesickness that can never be answered.
I cannot give them back what was taken.
But I can make sure a child in Gaza is warm tonight. That there is something soft. Something that says, even faintly, someone wants you to feel safe.
It is not the bed from before.
But it is not nothing.
Give a child that today.
For every child homesick for a home that no longer exists,
Hafsa