By Dr. Adnan Bouzan
My friend…
I no longer know where my body ends and where this homeland hidden in my veins begins; it has become like my shadow, preceding me wherever I go and returning with me, laden with what cannot be borne. Helplessness is no longer a guest passing through my heart; it has become the salt of my blood, a daily ritual recited by my veins like the prayer of the fearful. It is as if I am living on a single petrified song, a song that echoes through my veins when it awakens to its pain and falls asleep upon its ashes, until the song and I have become one body, one ache, one scream that finds no mouth to be uttered.
I feel that my heart is an ancient city without doors or windows, where widows walk their shadows across abandoned sidewalks, and the walls mourn themselves every morning, as if holding a new funeral for every stone fallen from their soul. The dust there is not merely dust, but the ghosts of old tales, and the sobbing of pavements that learned the language of silence from hearing so much shelling.
I carry in my chest the maps of neighborhoods obliterated, names that no longer resemble their owners because their owners have turned to dust, and images that shatter in my memory each time I try to mend them. I live among my own ruins as a refugee lives inside his memory; I wander through the rubble of myself as a man searches for his children in the wreckage of a burned house. Even the mirror, my friend, no longer recognizes me; it returns to me a pale image, as if it were not mine, or as if I had never been myself at all.
Writing is no longer a refuge as it once was; it has become a mass grave for letters. Every line is a small coffin, every word a gravestone for a memory assassinated each evening. I write so as not to suffocate on what is inside me, yet I suffocate on the words themselves, as though swallowing shards of glass that never leave my throat. I scream and only the echo slams against the walls of my head; I weep and only dust falls from me, like the ash of slaughtered homes.
What we are living has left words with nothing but slow death, and left the soul to become a cradle for a homeland led to a slow and solemn demise. Until I and the homeland have become one regret, one wound, a heart breathing ruin and pulsing with ash. As though I am the last witness to a city burning inside me, the last prisoner of a memory that besieges me and will not let me escape.
Everything, my friend, has turned to ash: our voices, our faces, even our dreams are born dead before they learn to rise. Hope itself has become a withered tree waving to us without giving shade. I carry the homeland in my blood as one carries a child in a small coffin, and I carry it in my chest as one carries the Day of Judgment in the eyes of a defeated prophet.
The homeland and I today are one visage; I bleed it and it bleeds me. I do not know which of us dies in the other, whether I die within it or it within me, but I know that together we are one wound breathing ruin, searching for another life in the ash. As though I am writing now not to save myself but to testify to its death, to leave a trace that says we were here once, and that words too are capable of resistance when everything else fails to resist.