Due to a small technical error, my daughter Salma accidentally deleted the writing application from my phone. That “App” which kept was my companion through long nights, disappeared from my device in a second. My stories, my writings, my unfinished novel, and my articles on mental health, all vanished in an instant. Damn technology! I thought I was safe, that such features were secure, however, I was wrong.
I declared mourning my heroes. I sat alone through the night, orphaned, searching for it. Mistakenly, I tried to relief myself by believing that the problem was going to be solved. I searched through the device “twenty thousand” times. I opened every folder, one by one, looking for a clue to my blue notebook.
Twenty years ago, writers were protected from such absurd errors. I spent an entire night digging through alleys and corridors of my phone, to no avail. I said to myself, I shall start from zero, however, I wondered, where does zero begin! Is zero when the woman dug through the graves looking for her child a zero! Or is it at the doorstep of the operating room, where parents’ hearts are waiting to hear that their children survived but such news never came!
Is zero where a father waited for twenty years to have his only child, but at the end he watches him falling lifeless on the ground while doctors are taking out a bullet from his chest!
Can literature justify calling zero, when a mother loses one child in every war, but in this war loses all of them at once, then their father, her own parents and all her siblings until she is torn away of the family tree which falls on her leaving her limbless?
Forget about the zero, as it is here worthless in all such painful stories. Let us think of another solution. Let us restore the stories and protect them from loss again. I still have a large brain and my head is still standing upright. I shall honor them by offering a permanent gallery where I shall hang the photo of every victim and write his story beneath it.
This is Wissam. He was martyred on his 20th birthday. His mother had already betrothed him to every girl in the family. Wissam was handsome. The girls adored him, his grieving mother says. She swears she has not slept a single night since he was martyred forty days ago.
At the right side of my brain, I shall hang a photo of Ahmad. I shall write under it, Ahmad had memorized the entire Qur’an and knew every verse in detail. At the same time, Ahmad knew every song of “Umm Kulthum”. He used to sing it every time he entered the bathroom. Ahmad was a miracle combining both Qur’an and music in one soul. He was run over by a flour truck. His head was crushed. His brain fluid spilled out. He might live, but without memory. That if he made it.
He also might have died while you are reading his story.
It is said that the right side of the brain specializes in creativity. There, I shall place a picture of the little girl, Sham. Sham could sketch any character with a blue pen within less than two minutes.
One deceptively calm day, she began drawing her martyred mother. She started to cry. She stood by the window. Her pen dropped from her hand. She rushed to retrieve it. Pens are expensive and rare to find now. It is beyond what an orphaned child could afford.
She ran to the street where it had fallen, unaware that a missile was racing her to that exact spot. A deafening explosion took place followed by silence. When the dust cleared, Sham was on the ground, clutching her pen, smiling at something distant she saw at that moment when her soul departed.
My head cannot bear all this pain. The gallery is only starting. There are many more sad stories. I fear someone will discover it, bomb my gallery and kill the heroes again.
It is the call for dawn prayer. I prayed then sat down thinking of a way to recover my lost notebook. And get the stories back to their right place. At last, I found a way to retrieve the blue notebook with all the stories in it. I embraced my heroes. I cried out of joy. I was happy to be with them and for them after we all thought we would never meet again. I fell asleep by then.
Dr. Said Muhammed Al-Kahlout
Psychologist and Writer
Gaza, Palestine
28/6/2025
(Translated by Rana Ardaji Bishara)
