Mixed feelings… I can’t quite describe them
Mixed feelings… I can’t quite describe them.
Two years have passed — yet they feel like a lifetime. Between the sounds of bombings, running through the rubble, and waiting for a dawn that never came. Today they say the war has stopped, but inside me, the battles are still raging.
I remember that first moment — October 2023 — when everything began, when fear became part of our daily routine, and the smoke turned into a dark cloud that never left the sky. Two years of loss, of pain beyond measure, and of hope that hid beneath the ruins and still rose with us every morning despite everything.
Now they’ve announced a ceasefire… but how does pain stop? How can we silence the echoes still ringing in our memories?
I feel relief that the war has ended, nostalgia for the souls we lost, and fear of what’s next. Between cautious joy and heavy tears, I find myself unable to fully rejoice or cry as I wish.
Two years have tested us in everything — in patience, in loss, in faith in life. And today, as we hear the word “peace,” we hold on to a fragile thread of hope — that the days ahead will be calmer, and that childhood will return to the small faces that forgot how to play.
They are truly mixed feelings — between a past that cannot be forgotten, and a present we are only beginning to believe has arrived.
Zaki A Sharqawi