To Taghreed, who ran faster than the wind—who ran to the sky and never returned.
I write this knowing you will never read it, knowing that words are helpless against the vast absence you’ve left behind. And yet, I write. Because I cannot let the silence win. Because I refuse to let them erase you, to reduce you to just another name in the endless lists of the dead. You were never just a name. You were a warmth, a presence, a light too feral to be contained.
Do you remember, Taghreed? That first time we sat together? The war had severed Gaza into two, cutting us off from the world, cutting families from one another like a wound split open. The silence was suffocating. But I had a way—a fragile, flickering connection through my eSIM, the only thin thread tying us to life beyond the siege. You asked if I could try. Just a call, just a voice, just a sign that your mother was still there.
And when her distant voice broke through the static—you crumbled. I watched you collapse into yourself as your mother’s voice—distant, crackling, impossibly real—spilled into the room. You held my phone like something sacred, your fingers trembling, your breath caught between disbelief and relief. You tried to speak, tried to answer her, but the words drowned before they reached the surface. Instead, you sobbed—silent at first, then violent, shaking, as though months of waiting, of longing, of fear had turned to liquid grief and poured out of you all at once.
That was the first time I saw you undone. But not the first time I saw you love.
You were a woman in your early forties, tall, swift-footed, always moving ahead of us. You had no children, but you were a mother in ways that mattered more than blood. When war stretched its fingers into my bones, when exhaustion weighed me down, when loneliness clawed at my ribs with cruel, unrelenting hands—you were there. You placed steaming cups of tea in front of me, pressed warm cookies into my hands, scolded me for not eating, for not taking care of myself, for carrying too much sorrow in my chest. And when sickness left me weak, you made lemon tea and soup, watching over me as if I were yours.
I remember our endless search for food at the market in North Gaza during the famine, the way you turned scarcity into laughter. You haggled with vendors like a warrior wielding humor as both sword and shield, rolling your eyes at prices that doubled overnight, laughing at the madness of it all. You made the unbearable bearable, filling the streets with your sharp wit, your kindness spilling over to everyone around you. The children of the neighborhood clung to you, drawn to the warmth you carried, to the kindness you never rationed. You were their home, their safe place, the light they ran to when the world outside turned too dark.
And yet, in the end, kindness was no shield.
Taghreed was martyred in the month of Shawwal—or perhaps it was April. It does not matter which calendar holds the truth; what matters is that she is gone. They came for you, Taghreed. They came with fire, with steel, with the cold indifference of those who turned killing into routine. They erased your home, your laughter, your very existence with the press of a button, the launch of a missile; the simple, monstrous act of not seeing you as human. They left nothing behind but ashes and silence.
And the world did not shake the way it should have.
But I shook.
Before they told me, I dreamt of you. I cannot recall the details, only that you were there—on the edges of my mind, hovering just beyond reach. Did you come to say goodbye? Did you want me to know before the world around me shattered? Or was it your pain, so vast that it broke through the barriers of the living and the dead, pulling me close before I even knew you were gone?
They told me you were burned. That there was nothing left of you but ruin. But I refuse to remember you that way.
I remember you in the scent of cardamom and baking, in the sharp wit that cut through despair like a blade, in the warmth of hands that always gave more than they received. I will remember the way you moved—always ahead, always too fast for me to keep up. I will remember you as you were: alive, vibrant, unstoppable.
You always ran ahead of me, Taghreed. And in the end, you ran again—this time toward the sky, toward something beyond war, beyond grief. And you did not return.
One day, I will catch up to you.
Until then, I will carry you in every cup of tea, in every stolen moment of laughter, in every act of defiant kindness. I will remember you not as they left you, but as you were—unstoppable, unbreakable, unforgettable.
With love,
From the one who could never match your pace.
Alaa Alqaisi