This Is All That Remains for Me!

I don’t know how I delayed until I decided to open the photo album I salvaged from the ruins of my bombed house two years ago. How did it come time to open it and browse through the old photos collected in it, whose owners' features are hardly recognizable due to their age? But the moment came like this when my cousin's daughter arrived to visit Cairo, and I met her. We began to talk about our shared memories. How beautiful it is to find someone you share so many memories with at this age! I wished time would stretch and night would not come so we could relive those memories. I hoped that the day would extend until my last breath in this life so we could talk about the country, the grandparents, and the fathers as if I owned nothing but them and loved no one but them.

On the day the building I lived in was bombed in the center of Gaza, while I was trying to retrieve some things from among the rubble, I spotted a drawer that had been forcefully emptied due to the cabinet taking a harsh blow and tilting without touching the ground. However, the drawer was in such a condition that I couldn't fully empty it, and I barely managed to retrieve one album from a collection of photo albums. I was doing this while my children were shouting at me to hurry so we could escape to the southern part of the enclave as we were instructed, knowing well that the occupation's habit is to re-bomb places that had been bombed the first time.

This is how I held the album close to my chest, then hid it fiercely under my shoulder, gathering whatever clothes and small items I could find, only to discover later that they were of no use. I had left my important things behind, like a medicine box that had become scarce just a few days into the war. Yet, I felt a sense of relief that I managed to save this album, forgetting to open it, as if I were saving a sum of money or a treasure. I was reassured by its presence in the secure place where I had hidden it, and I didn’t decide to open it until my cousin's daughter came, and like her, I was surprised by the old photos my father had kept, which I had forgotten, and I saw them as if it were happening for the first time.

I remembered that I used to classify the photos and put each group in a special album, like photos of my children’s childhood, and photos of my childhood in the camp with everyone my father knew and lived around, and photos from my modest wedding during the stone intifada in 1991, and finally pictures of my children when they reached their teenage years, showing beautiful places on Gaza's beach.

Thus, the photo album contained a collection of memories of my father, as if fortune had decided to favor me because it knows how much I love him, and because the beautiful days we lived in the refugee camp in southern Gaza are the shared days for my cousin's daughter and me, where our parents’ families lived next to each other alongside my uncle's family. The camp, with all its rituals, united those families, and the good and loving relationship culminated in kinship and marriage. Thus, my cousin's daughter screamed with joy and eagerness when she saw an old picture of her grandmother and uncle.

This is how I discovered that photos are the last remnants we have after losing everything and after exile swallowed us, where memories became images in the mind, and I don't see remnants like I used to when I was in Gaza. I used to make sure to walk in the alleys of Khan Younis camp, even though most of them had changed their features, with multi-story houses replacing those that once had roofs of tiles or slabs of cement. But that round would put me in living encounters with the past and memories as I imagined the days of my early childhood, where my kind, plump grandmother sat in front of our house with the neighbors gathering around her, while we played around and she tied my younger brother’s leg with a piece of fabric from her dress to pull him back whenever he moved away because she couldn’t run after him.

Here I discovered that I must exchange a morning greeting with the remaining relatives whom exile swallowed before me so I may live the memories that truly grant me life because life is life in your country, under its sky and on its land, and other than that, you are merely remnants that never know how to gather.