How do you carry a home that keeps breaking?

An essay about Gaza, about leaving, and about carrying memories.

I always thought of Gaza as a place where time folded in on itself. A closed world – dense, familiar, overwhelming – where you grow too fast or not at all.

I was the child my aunts, my older cousins, and even my friends’ mothers would pull into conversations about family issues, relationships, and everyday problems.

My teacher called me “the sharpened tongue”, not because I was rude, but because I refused to be shaped into someone softer, quieter, more acceptable.

Sometimes, I slipped into the moments that reminded me I was a child – like sewing tiny clothes for my Barbies with my cousins.

But usually, I hovered somewhere between the world of children who didn’t quite understand me and the world of adults whose conversations I somehow understood.

On Fridays, my family used to drive from our neighbourhood in as-Sudaniya down the coastal al-Rashid Street to Rafah – about an hour’s drive.

One of those days, Gaza felt less like a cage, more like a home.

I was 12, and my siblings and I joked about old memories – the way my brother used to mispronounce words, the tiny disasters that became inside jokes only we understood.

I always knew I would leave. I remember a family gathering when every girl my age was asked where she planned to study – in Gaza, they meant, naming local universities as if the question had no other geography.

When it was my turn, I blurted: “Study in Gaza? I’m going abroad. I’ll be a journalist like my father.”

Some people encouraged me. Others laughed. But I already felt the world outside calling.

The world calling

When I left Gaza in 2019 at 17 to study international relations, it was the first time I flew on my own, and because I was under 18, I carried a court document permitting me to travel alone.

At the Rafah crossing, I stood between my father and older brother, Omar, memorising their faces.

At every airport, I was pulled aside for extra searches because of my black passport. Officers asked why I was travelling alone, where I was going, what I planned to study – ordinary questions to them that felt like tests I had to pass to earn a life outside the only world I knew.

My first night in Cyprus, I slept more deeply than I ever had in my life.

When I woke to a loud sound, my body panicked, as if it were an explosion. I ran into the corridor only to find suitcase wheels dragging across the floor.

Then my mind caught up with my body: You’re not in Gaza anymore.

That morning, I wandered the dorms looking for a mini market. Someone told me it was in the basement, but I got lost in the corridors, trying to buy an adapter and some toast.

Everything felt unfamiliar – especially the silence.

Nothing hummed, nothing hovered, nothing threatened. The stillness almost frightened me.

My first real conversations were at the English prep course at the university. It was a small classroom that felt like a tiny world: Classmates from Cyprus, Turkiye, Lebanon, Morocco, Libya.

We traded words and accents, and my teacher loved how quickly I learned new vocabulary.

When I told people I am from Palestine, some heard “Pakistan”, or pointed vaguely at their maps; I showed them pictures, then places.

In classes, some asked whether we “actually had a life” there. One person asked, sincerely, if Gaza existed. The confusion wasn’t malicious; it was a vacuum in the world’s imagination where my home is.