The Loneliness of the Spared
By Haya Abu Shammala
Before I was born in a private clinic in Gaza, my family had already lived a full decade in the “elsewhere.” Ten years of becoming, of stories with beginnings, middles, and punchlines in which I was not even a distant footnote. By the time I arrived, those years abroad had fossilized into legend. Growing up, my parents and siblings would casually summon that shared past: neighbors from forgotten corners of the world, school friends with unpronounceable names, and accidents—both catastrophic and hilarious—that served as the family’s private liturgy. And there I would sit, small, wide-eyed, and quietly offended I had missed out on that glamorous prequel to my own existence. Every anecdote was a closed door; every laugh was a language I didn’t yet speak.
My jealousy was the dramatic kind only children can perfect. I would glare at them with all the wounded dignity of a six-year-old philosopher betrayed by fate, convinced I had been cheated out of something foundational. I was a late guest to a celebration long finished, an appendix tacked onto a finished novel; bound into the spine, yes, but absent from the lines everyone quoted.
But a far heavier and more brutal distance lay in wait. There would come a time when a language barrier would rise between us far higher than the one built from foreign names and old anecdotes. Not the mild exclusion of missing a story, but the harsher exile of being locked out of a reality that deforms everyone within it.
In 2021, I left Gaza for my studies, believing this distance would be a physical inconvenience, not a spiritual dislocation. But every time Israeli bombs struck home, a hairline crack formed within me, a subtle fracture running between where my body stood and where my heart lived. As the genocide of 2023 bled from weeks into months, and from months into years, those fractures deepened and multiplied, spiderwebbing through my sense of belonging until entire pieces felt like they might break off.
At first, this erosion was legible. It was written in the hollowing faces that flickered through the static of brief video calls; in the premature silvering of friends who should have been inhabiting the brightest noon of their youth. Conversations became heavy, hesitant things. You no longer knew what to ask, and they no longer knew what could possibly be said. Words hovered like wounded birds and then retreated, as if language itself recoiled at its own inadequacy.
I have become a foreigner to my own blood. My family, my friends, my hometown—everyone now speaks a dialect carved from the grit of survival, carried by bare hands that have buried far too much. Suspended in the safety of distance, I can grasp only the faintest echoes of their frequency, never the full, crushing weight of its meaning. To witness a genocide from afar, to watch the systematic erasure of your home and your people, stone by stone, story by story, is to inhabit a shattering in-between. You drift away from where you come from yet never arrive where you are. To those back home, you are a ghost—a specter who no longer shares the heat of the open wound. To those here, you are incomprehensible—a body carrying a grief they cannot translate.
The growing distance did not remain silent. It has organized itself into a language. The people in Gaza—my loved ones among them—now speak a language that didn’t exist when I left, shaped by necessities I was spared and losses I did not endure. Their vocabulary has grown not through culture or time, but through relentless deprivation: words invented for hunger without end, for healing sought in the absence of medicine. They speak of time that no longer unfolds but circles itself. They speak of places that have been plucked out of geography, stripped of their former innocence and recast as military coordinates and mass graves.
With every new tragedy, you are pushed a little farther outward, drifting into an endless, salt-heavy ocean. Unmoored. Your own reflection foreign to you.
The genocide in Gaza has marked an unfathomable chapter in Palestinian history, an abyss of horror unlike anything witnessed before. The scale of destruction, mass killing, engineered starvation—each surpassed the limits of imagination and precedent. Entire lineages were erased, belief systems shaken, memories displaced, minds overturned.
I would dial and redial, bargaining with the signal, praying for a connection to stitch us back together. But when a call finally clawed its way through, I would freeze—every sentence feeling too small, every word a violation. How do you speak when language has been outpaced by catastrophe? How do you offer comfort to people still trapped in the fire? What sense does a stupid, hollow “How are you?” offer when spoken to those living with wounds too deep for language? What currency do words have when pain has outgrown grammar altogether? And if the question dares to cross my lips, will the words make it across before the call is swallowed by silence once more, before the signal snaps under the violence that severs even conversations in half?
One day, my brother called around midnight. My heart raced so fast I thought it might give out. A late-night call from Gaza is never casual; it arrives already carrying names. Before I answered, the faces of everyone I love back home paraded through my mind in a heavy procession. I thought, “Who is it this time? And how did it happen?”
When I answered, the only words I had were, “What happened?”
“We’re all ok. Don’t worry,” his voice arrived calm and gentle, as if filtered through silk.
He told me how he couldn’t sleep. He had walked a long distance from the tent and climbed a high hill to hunt for a signal strong enough to hold a voice. The weather, he said, was nice. He felt like talking, like having a normal conversation the way we did in the good “old” days.
I broke.
It was the first time in almost a year that I allowed myself to cry while speaking to anyone back home. Since the genocide began, I had been wearing an invisible suit of armor: I must not collapse. I must not reveal weakness. I could not afford to fracture when everyone else was already broken open.
But that night, the armor fell.
I cried openly, unguarded, while my brother waited after repeatedly assuring me that everything was “ok.” For the first time in nearly two years, we spoke like siblings again. For a couple of minutes, we were no longer two wounded soldiers calling out to each other through the thick smoke of a battlefield, exchanging damage reports and survival confirmations. He asked how our football team was performing. He asked what book I was reading. Questions so ordinary they felt almost metaphysical, relics from a world where concern was allowed to be small.
It struck me how much I missed being someone’s little sister, missed inhabiting a version of myself that was allowed to be small before the world withdrew the permission to lean, to be carried, to exist without the constant labor of holding oneself together.
I missed calling my mother for recipes, but she barely had food. I missed calling my father for advice on my dying plant, but his garden, and everything else he built, was already dead. I missed calling my sisters to vent before their lives became negotiations with death. I missed calling my friends, but some were gone, and others walked through survival emptied of themselves.
While the light leading home dissolves into a thickening fog, life “here” summons me with cruel authority. It demands a presence I no longer possess, a focus that feels like a betrayal of the ghosts I carry, as if I am still intact, as if I had not been split in two. But I can’t offer what I no longer own. I move through my days as a diluted version of myself, a silhouette imitating steadiness while my core pulses in a different time zone, under a different sky, amidst the smell of cordite and pulverized concrete.
There are messages waiting for answers, deadlines circling like vultures, rent that arrives indifferent to the worlds collapsing inside you, friendships that expect warmth you can no longer generate. Here, life insists on momentum. There, life is suspended between the breath and the grave. And you exist in the uneasy space between them, living two parallel lives and failing at both, because neither will allow you the mercy of wholeness.
You are a survivor, yet your survival is a form of permanent statelessness. You are too spared to belong to your people’s immediate agony, but too inwardly scarred for the world here to truly see.
I find a haunting symmetry in the story of the World’s Loneliest Whale, a creature that navigates the lightless reaches of the deep, calling out at a frequency of 52 Hertz. Its song is not a failure of intent but a tragedy of resonance; it speaks at a pitch that none of the rest of its kind is equipped to hear. It is a biological ghost, broadcasting a perfectly articulated solitude into a vacuum. What I once read as a quirk of natural history, I now recognize as the architecture of my own survival.
To be spared is to undergo an irreversible recalibration of the soul’s acoustics. I have been tuned to a pitch of grief for which there is no local grammar in the world of the intact. Yet I also remain discordant to the visceral, jagged dialect of those who remained within the fire. I am a walking dissonance, a transmission without a terminal. I move through the sunlit streets of the “here” as a counterfeit, my voice carrying the weight of a collapsing geography that the people beside me cannot hear. And when I reach back toward the “there,” my words arrive too sanitized, too weightless, shorn of the grit and survival-dust that now defines the dialect of my blood.
This is the ontological tax of the spared: to be granted breath at the cost of belonging. I am no longer a bridge between two worlds, but the vast, frigid current of the water beneath. Like that solitary wanderer of the indifferent blue, I am a frequency with no home, a voice destined to travel forever across an ocean where the song of the survivor meets no echo, and the shore I remember no longer exists to receive the sound.
Haya Abu Shammala is a Palestinian writer from Gaza. After leaving Gaza in 2021 to pursue her MA in Translation Studies, she found herself unable to return following graduation. She is a firm believer that the survival of a people is held within the smallest details of their stories.