It Was Not Always Easy, Most Of The Time, It Felt Like Peeling Skin And Reopening Healing Wounds. Most

It was not always easy, most of the time, it felt like peeling skin and reopening healing wounds. Most of the time, the stub of the missing limb would ache, as though another one would sprout at any second and pull the trigger over your head.

Some nights, you would wake up in cold sweat and start crying at the unbearable pain of twisting knives inside your ribs and an invisible force pushing at your sternum. Some nights, you would wish for Death to claim you already. 

You would be sitting in traffic amongst the crowd, staring out the window and enjoying the scenery then sudden loneliness would swarm you like a war troop, trampling you till you mingle with the soil. 

You will be thinking of eyes, nose, lips, entangled fingers and limbs like bullets spinning in the barrel of your mind till they hit the target. 

Bullseye; can’t miss with a revolver mind.

You cover your face, blocking the bleeding thoughts from spilling on the streets’ pavement. You drag the body everywhere as you send the emails, you clean the crime scene after every workday, you make up alibis for the sleepless nights and overflowing prescriptions. 

Breathe through your nose, lie through your teeth, only cry at funerals, behind closed doors and suffocating pillows. 

You embrace and hold hands, refusing to think of how it wrong it feels. You try not to think about the shape that’s molded over yours, not to think of the weight every smile bears on your face now that they’re gone. 

You want to apologize to those standing by your side. You want to tell them to wait a little longer, unsure how long that would take, unsure whether there is such a time to come.

You get up on the wrong side of the bed, theirs. Somedays, you make the coffee and add milk to it, like they used to like it. Sometimes, you eat the overly sweet desserts that they used to crave so much. 

You buy groceries and throw out the trash, you cook the meals and wash the dishes. You go to work and meet the people. You live with a ticking bomb in your core that resets every few years. You live with the constant haunting presence of a ghost in your blind spot. 

The pretense has become easier, you could almost believe in this illusion of peace. You could almost believe that the freefall would land you in their arms again. 

You look at the mirror and try to confess, you hang your head, ready for your sentence. You put your frail hands in front of you and think of how they have managed to strangle every beautiful moment. 

You practise your smiles, focus your eyes and try to hold the sputtering light in them for a few hours, just long enough to fool the passer byes. 

You twist and turn honeyed words around your tongue and pour them into eager ears. You bleed on paper for the starving beaks, put yourself on the altar and offer yourself as the scapegoat. 

You watch as they dine over your body, compliment the tenderness of the meat. Watch as they wipe their lips in satisfaction and ask for seconds. 

I can almost taste spring in this! they say, as they relish in the juice of your throbbing heart, awaiting evergreen happiness after endless misery. 

And as they savor every parcel of your being, you lay there and pray that they eat away at the flooding spring of love that won’t stop oozing from you in generous gushes, draining you like a slaughtered sheep till you stop wiggling and struggling to grab for an unreachable hand. 

And as you painstakingly stagger back up, drag your feet and protruding insides through the fields, you try and feel for the release and absence of the heavy curse named after a fantasized emotion. Every time, you trudge with dangling pockets full of hefty love that you will serve on silver platters for ravenous mouths.

And as you stumble on the bones of your predecessors, you clutch onto the featherlight belief that a home awaits your return from the battlefield, 

you cradle the hope that this time, you can grab onto their face without it turning into foam. You run your hands through their hair without it turning into sharp blades. 

You cling onto their arms without them crumbling into clods. 

You hang in the deep lake of their eyes without drowning. 

You latch onto their mouth without worry of snatching the very last breath out of their lungs.

And as you finally dare to whisper their name, you won’t be stricken by deafening silence.

And as you finally lean into the firm presence of their existence, you won’t turn into flames.

And as you finally pour all the love into its designed recipient, you will drink to your heart’s content and cease being the one feasted upon.

The use of white phosphorous in Palestine is so calculated and insidious because not only does it cause horrific, usually fatal burns but its residue in the envionrment can cause illness, birth defects, and cancers for generations afterward. Look at the Twitter account Fallujah Birth Defects (graphic) which documents defects and abnormalities so rare most medical journals don't have them. White phosphorous was dropped in Fallujah in 2004 and it's still killing Iraqi babies. What do you think it's going to do to the survivors of the Palestinian genocide.

Say it's good for the narrative and move on

oh no, I'm in my silly saddies

It’s like when people say “maybe Gaza would have clean drinking water if Hamas would build that infrastructure instead of buying weapons” it’s like. Do you know anything about water resources in Gaza? The coastal aquifer was depleted in large part by *Israeli* extraction and contaminated by sewage and seawater. And the coastal waters, airspace, and borders are still controlled by Israel despite the 2005 “disengagement.” Wadi Gaza is diverted into an Israeli dam, so that water does not go to Gaza. The coastal aquifer alone is not enough to provide for the population’s needs, yet it’s all they really have access to, contributing to the over-extraction. This isn’t something Hamas could just budget for. And THIS IS THE STATUS QUO DURING “PEACE”