We still the victims of our Homeland´s dream, The Homeland, that exists in our platonic imagination, where you can see it in the way you love it, from outside your cell, and far from the exile.

I read Les Misérables when I was sixteen years old and watched the movie a few years later. The scene that I failed to notice in the novel but found immensely powerful in the movie entails a group of men that had remained and fought the barricade until the end. They may have been a figment of the author’s imagination, but I saw them in reality where I came from—in Syria…

When I was nine years old, I loved a blonde girl who was a year older than me. What I recall from this naive love is that I was behaving foolishly and madly whenever I was around her. A decade and a half have passed since, but I still lose control whenever I fall in love and behave madly and recklessly. The only difference is that my naivety then would be scandalous today; the time when my mother palliated my blunders is long gone.

Once upon a time during the siege of the Eastern Ghouta, we bought oranges for an amount that exceeded 15 US dollars. There were three of us then. Being in a state of disbelief, we kissed the oranges and took pictures with them, before proceeding to eat.
My second memory of that day, aside from the picture, was that the oranges tasted poorly after having had fodder for lunch. Yes, this is the truth. In the twenty first century, there are half a million people who have been besieged in the Eastern Ghouta of Damascus for five years, who have reached a state of hunger compelling them to compete with whatever has remained of livestock for food.

In a prison cell, a soldier tried to sever the vein in my right hand because, according to him, “it wrote.” He was heavily inebriated so I told him that I am left-handed to save my right wrist; his blade had already penetrated twenty millimeters of my wrist. I lied during that day. Perhaps it was a “red lie…”

At a cell, under the Al-Thawra Bridge in Damascus, I was detained for five days. The guard who served the dictatorship would urinate through the perforated wall. He would curse our God and parents. I could vividly recall the sound of him cursing and his foul smell until today… The memory will not fade until they fall…

Yasser and I were fleeing from a security patrol. We reached a wall that could not be overcome with ease. Yasser leaned forward to give me a boost to escape. He chose me over himself. After one minute, he was able to surmount the wall himself, and we were triumphant in that incident against the armed soldiers. Two years later, however, a small shrapnel had penetrated his femoral artery. The belligerent criminals had succeeded in attaining their vengeance through his death… They countered my slight achievement with a dagger in the heart…

I had an uncle who was the primal intellectual in my mother’s side of the family. He had lost his right arm and had a library that was possibly the greatest I have seen until today. I frequently borrowed some of his books. I never finished reading them, but he spoke to me each time about every book until it felt like I had read it. His uttered words were the fifth dimension in a young boy’s theater, sitting excitedly before him on a stool…

Once upon a time as a child, I was playing with our neighbors’ daughter. We saw a bird whose life had expired. Though we had just encountered the bird for the first time, we were shocked to witness the death of an innocent creature. We cried and recited Al-Fatiha—the first chapter of the Koran—then gave the bird a burial…
After a decade or so of that incident, I encountered death once more. This time, it entailed birds that were closer to my heart. I cried and recited Al-Fatiha but couldn’t get a chance to bury them as some of them had passed away while I was in detention and some whilst fleeing…