We don't have to be dead for your movements to be alive

I’ve lost more than words can hold and I refuse to let the world dress that up as strength.

Every day I watch death arrive in numbers, twenty bodies before breakfast, fifty more by noon, a hundred before the sky darkens, and somehow, the count resets and begins again the next morning like it’s routine like this is just life now. I am twenty-five years old and already feel centuries old. I should be writing about the ordinary chaos of youth, about love that falters and cities that move too fast, but instead I write about a place where even the earth no longer wants to hold our dead. For more than two hundred days, I’ve watched my people die, bloated with hunger, turned to ash before they even learned to spell their names and I’ve had to stay alive through it. I’ve had to carry my son past mangled bodies and flattened homes, had to hold my wife’s hand while running barefoot through glass and bones, had to bury friends without knowing if I would ever be allowed to speak their names again, and I write because it’s the only thing that doesn’t rot when everything else around me does. But I’m exhausted, by how our pain has become global currency for people who have never even seen Gaza on a map but still feel entitled to narrate it, to frame it, to turn it into a prism through which they polish their theories, their brands and their movements. They romanticize our starvation, turn the dying of our babies into poetic slogans about resistance and legacy, but I want none of that, I want formula for our newborns, antibiotics for our elderly, shelter for our wounded, classrooms for our children, not metaphors, not manifestos. I don’t want to be a symbol of resilience anymore, I want to be a person who wakes up without wondering who I’ll lose today. I want to be a writer without having to prove my suffering as legitimacy. But the world doesn’t want us if we are not bleeding or brave. Our lives only fit into their narratives when we are extraordinary, when we are dying in ways that inspire TED talks and book deals and resolutions. The reality is they do not want us to live well, they just want us to die beautifully. And I am sick with the weight of it, with the lie of it, with the performance of global sympathy that folds us neatly into its analysis while never reserving even the smallest space for our actual survival. My trauma is not theory, it is breath and bone and nightmare and silence. I wake up gasping for air from knowing that my people’s destruction is more sustainable to the world than our freedom. And I’m twenty-five. And I don’t know how to carry this much history, this much grief, this much betrayal from a world that wants me to write, to speak, to tweet, to explain, while everything I love is being razed to dust. I am a writer. But I am also just a man who wants his son to live without being called a miracle just for surviving the day. Is that so unimaginable? I’ve been carrying the unbearable truth that this place, my home, is being emptied of breath and history and the world watches, speaks, debates, applauds, makes us perfect silhouettes and symbols and citations and then turns away again. Our babies gasping in silence, our mothers have no milk left in their breasts, our fathers broken under the weight of not being able to save them, our elderly die quietly because there is no medication and no electricity and no doctors left standing, the schools are gone and the hospitals are graveyards and the streets are bones and dust and memory, and I am already tired of being strong, I am tired of being exceptional, I am tired of being turned into a witness the world only listens to when our blood is fresh. They say we are brave and resilient, and that we carry the spirit of our ancestors and the struggle of the generations, but what if we don’t want to carry anything anymore? What if we just want to rest and live without being called heroes or used as headlines, only as people? What if we don’t want our trauma turned into a metaphor for resistance? I never asked to be a symbol. I wanted to be a writer, a father, a friend, someone who walks home without calculating the odds of being hit from above. I wanted to write about ordinary things like the way the sun touches the buildings in Gaza at 5pm or the stories my grandmother used to tell or how love moves between people even in small kitchens. But the world will only let us live if we are dying beautifully, if our corpses can teach something, if our pain can be folded into their politics. Our lives are useful to them only when they are ending. And I cannot carry that anymore. I cannot keep being a story that flatters someone else’s conscience. I don’t want my life to be a primetime debate.