Zoulfa Katouh

“Beautiful.” But he isn’t looking at the necklace.

We will come back home one day.

Looking back now, it feels as if I’m watching a different girl, one who wears my face and speaks with my voice.

You know this revolution is about getting our lives back. It’s not about survival. It’s about us fighting.

We’ll be lucky if the worst that happens to us here is death, and you know that. Either we’ll get arrested by the military or a bomb will kill us.

“We fight while we’re still here, Salama, because this is our country. This is the land of your father, and his father before him. Your history is embedded in this soil. No country in the world will love you as yours does.”

Love for our country is in our bone marrow. It’s in our national anthem, which we sang every morning from our first day in school. The words were just words then. But now, after all of this, they have become our reality.

I don’t want to dwell on the past. I don’t want to cry about how I’m going to end my teen years with nothing more than lost hope and nightmare-filled sleep. I want to survive.

Whatever control I exude during the day falters when the sun sets.

I need to focus on something other than the fear and pain that have taken root in my soul.