The last time life revealed to me its most destitute and terrifying face, I did not know how I would ever learn to inhabit the quiet of other cities. How can one dwell in cultivated stillness after one’s eyes have been filled with dust, rubble, and the anatomy of ruin? The scenes that once forced themselves into my vision—walls collapsed mid-sentence, streets opened like wounds—still linger just behind my gaze. And before me now stretches an orderly horizon of trees, water, and disciplined silence. I often ask myself whether all the cities of the earth, gathered in their civility and grace, could erase what my eyes have witnessed. Whether their calm could soften the noise that continues to rumble inside my head like an underground current. I smile often. I offer careful English, rounded and polite. I watch faces shift when I say that I am Palestinian. That I am from Gaza.

I reside now in a gracious villa that feels borrowed from another century. At times I imagine I am inhabiting the house of some childhood fiction—Judy Abbott and Sally might have raced through these corridors, lit by afternoon dust. My room overlooks Lake Wannsee. The view returns me to another window, another body of water. I once lived beside the Mediterranean; my room opened onto Gaza’s restless, salt-heavy sea stretching out to a horizon I never understood. I did not know what lay beyond that blue line where sea fastened itself to sky. Gaza, for all its warmth, was a vast enclosure. Children grew beside the waves without knowing what the waves concealed. There was nothing visible beyond that line—only a thin blue seam binding heaven to water. And now I stand beyond that edge. Far beyond it. Between me and that shore lie continents, seas, entire oceans.

There is an irony in admitting that the only place I ever felt an unbroken sense of safety was Gaza. Then Dublin, with its gentle reserve. And now Wannsee–I do not feel safe here. I feel suspended. Observing. Present but unrooted. The quiet does not settle inside me. It hovers around me like something borrowed. When I wake in the night, I do not hear waves. No roar pressing against the dark, no salt entering the lungs. The lake lies frozen, unmoving, its surface sealed. I find myself wishing for a disturbance—some trembling in the water that would answer the unrest in my chest. The immobility feels unnatural, almost accusatory. A body born on the Mediterranean coast does not easily learn to breathe frost. I used to wonder why writers lamented January. In Gaza, January was tender. People welcomed rain as a guest. They prayed for it when it delayed. Even in scarcity there was gratitude for clouds. Only here did I understand what January means in the Western world: a long corridor of night, a cold that enters the bones, a darkness that encourages solitude and writing. In Gaza, the month that stretches like this is July—not merciless as in the Gulf, but heavy, prolonged, lingering. I have not yet lived a full summer here. I do not know what this landscape will ask of me when it burns.

On my second day in Wannsee, I met a Belgian writer in the kitchen while I was making coffee. She writes children’s literature. She told me she had once visited Palestine with her Palestinian friend, and as she spoke I saw in her eyes Nablus and Hebron, Acre’s shore, Jerusalem’s stone washed in afternoon light. She showed me photographs of marches, of flags raised in her country’s streets, of her mother chanting in Arabic words she did not fully understand but carried faithfully. She spoke of her Syrian neighbor, of her grandmother who joined demonstrations, of Palestine whispered in rooms far from it. She sang to me Fairuz in broken Arabic —“Nassam ‘alaina el-hawa, Min mafraki elwadi, ya hawa dakhil el-hawa, khidni ala bladi” (The air breezed upon us, from the road of the valley…Oh breeze, for love’s sake, Take me home) her pronunciation uneven, her feeling intact. She may not have known every meaning, yet she carried the Mediterranean’s salt in her voice. We rolled grape leaves together, lemon and olive oil perfuming the kitchen. We exchanged confidences. I gave her my stories, and those of my people. We wept through Hamnet, perhaps alone in that dark cinema. I asked her to guess the themes of Fairuz’s songs; she answered with a tenderness that startled me. She told me of translating testimonies from children during the war of 2008—the other side of the world, the version that rarely reached us, we who were living inside the obliteration. She told me how Gaza unsettled their moral ground, how it rearranged their understanding of distance and responsibility. Gaza, so small that it could be mistaken for a modest borough inside Berlin, and yet vast enough to hold generations of waiting.

A Ukrainian writer once told me that we share much. She said that for four years her country has endured what refuses to end, that for two years mine has been suffering. I told her—more firmly than I intended—that we have been in the womb of this suffering since 1948. She looked at me and did not answer. I wondered later if my words sounded harsh. What good comes from layering grief as if sorrow were a shared garment? Every catastrophe carries its own color, its own grammar, its own history. Yet to compress the Palestinian ordeal into two recent years alone is to fold away decades and pretend the crease is the whole fabric. If I spoke plainly, it was because simplification has always been the first act of erasure. I remember, too, the first book I picked up in Berlin. It was a book of photographs. I found it in a small bookshop by chance. On the first page, it read: You can’t go home again. I remember standing there, staring at the sentence. It was simple, in tone almost casual. Something inside me broke when I read it.