Ruins.

 

You are very weak, he said to me. 

He was wearing the heaviest boots I’ve ever seen, black and laced, curving along his calves, with a huge platform that served him perfectly in beating the living daylights out of me.

He wasn’t breaking a sweat, standing tall and poised while he kicked my face and sides with unequaled precision. 

But I wasn’t weak. 

After all, I was a child, he was a man. As much of a man as you can be when you rejoice in beating children. I was on the floor, with my hands tied behind my back and my legs fastened together, he was on his two feet, with all the power one can have in such a situation. I was muzzled, wet cloth stuck between my lips, making it hard to breath or even whine, he could laugh, and he did, thunderous voice reverberating off the walls painfully.

We weren’t on equal ground. 

It was unfair.

I wasn’t weak.

I was looking for my sister’s plush toy in the rubble. 

I was digging my cramping fingers in the dirt, between the remains of the walls I leaned on for so long, the walls that had my family’s portraits hanging all along them, my father’s graduation ceremony and my brother’s wedding and our big beautiful smiles. The walls that held us. 

I moved the bigger pieces with difficulty, breathing in the dirt and the mould, feeling a sneeze brewing in the back of my nose. 

My arms were tired, and weary, but I couldn’t say no to my sister’s pleas, I couldn’t ruin her perfect view of the world, how everything she ever wanted could be real, how her wishes were always answered.

I didn’t want her to understand yet.

Standing on what was once my home, I felt how null my life was.

It was my home. The one place in this world where I felt safe and loved.

Everything so easily crumpled to the ground.

I wished I was a wall.

The sounds the shells made when connecting with the floor were unnaturally loud, they shook the ground beneath us, and made our bones rattle and children sob. 

The bombs felt mightier than any god I could pray to. I spent hours a day pleading with any deity to pluck us from this place, to take us somewhere the buildings don’t fall on people like houses of cards.

My prayers remain unanswered.

My sister buried her tearful cheeks in my neck, she sang a lullaby to herself, rocking herself to sleep like Grandma used to do. 

I held her tightly against me, I was everything she had at that moment, the only sliver of comfort available. 

No matter how I felt, I had to make this better for her, endurable and forgettable.

She was so little for this hurt.

So was I.

The soldiers were very strict with us.

Forget your slightly mean teacher, and your father’s disciplinary rounds, this was purely to satisfy their sadistic tendencies.

They were strict in how they tortured us, in how the loudest of our screams barely made them flinch.

If anything, they looked amused.

One of them was dousing my cell mate in ice water and whipping him, in an attempt to get him to spill names he didn’t know, of places he never set foot in. 

The entire ordeal was so obviously ill-fated, the boy was already skin on bones, his last whipping left him bloodied and feverish. God knows what kind of bacteria was festering in those wounds, eating him inside out like rotten fruit.

He was such a sweet child, fun to be around, gentle and loyal and good at playing football.

I knew his mom, her fresh bread was unmatched and had all the children in the street running to her doorstep once the yeasty smell reached them.

His father was a professor in the university my oldest brother frequented, he was beloved and respected. 

Nobody knows where he is.

I spent the night hearing his moans, and hoping he stays alive.

How could I tell his parents the truth if not?

That their lovely son died in the bed adjoining mine?

That he said their names while his entire body turned to rot? 

By the time I was out of there, there was nobody to get the news to.

I was let out because of my “remarkably agreeable behavior”, or whatever they called it. 

Which was just their way of saying that I was useless, and they needed the leverage my release would give them over the liberation fighters.

I didn’t care, anything that got me back to my family was worth celebrating.

The prison years didn’t leave me that easily though, they held onto me, borrowed under my skin and made every day I spent in freedom feel like ash in my mouth.

All the needless nights being tortured left me with a permanent limp, my hands shook violently, and I spent more time dizzy than not.

But I was out, and I didn’t care.

I didn’t care.

Until the nightmares came, and the screaming when everyone is sleeping, when everyone is already sick of loud voices, of guns and bombs.

The last thing they needed was me writhing in my bed, making pained sounds.

So I stopped sleeping. 

The empty streets were my friends, I would stroll under the moon, trying to remind myself of all the beautiful times I had before my life became painful chaos.

There weren’t many to start with. 

I felt empty of anything but pain.

How painful it all was, how utterly painful.

The doctor tells me that flashbacks are normal, that I will get them frequently while my brain fights with the remnants of my “trauma”.

How is it that everything I went through could be put into one word, how is it that the bodies I held, lifeless and limp, the tears I shed, the houses I saw fall to pieces, the rubble I dug into with my own two hands, how could it all be just trauma?

How can my cellmate’s screams, then sobs, then cries, then moans then whines then deadly silence, be a symptom I take pills for?

How can my sister’s skin, so pliant and grey and dusty, my fingers pushing, moving, grasping, trying to breathe life into it from the fingertips to the still heart, be reduced to six letters I can easily say and write?

It was outrageous how a long past of nothing but the most harrowing things happening to me, to my people, to my life and my country, could be resumed in such a white sounding concept.

Trauma.

I am nothing but ruins.

There is not one inch of me that wouldn’t cry blood if you pushed too hard.

There is not one second of my days that wasn’t stained with grief.

Trauma is a luxury I couldn’t afford.

And no scientific fancy wording could change that.

I am not coherent. My timeline is not linear and my memories come to me in bursts and migraines. I still remember my mother’s scent but her name escapes me sometimes. I would describe every nook and cranny of our living room but I can’t recall how many years I was detained. My friends all died and I can barely see their faces when I close my eyes.

Is this it? Trauma?

I am nothing.

I am nothing but ruins.

Marwa Damaan