How do you carry a home that keeps breaking?

I always thought of Gaza as a place where time folded in on itself. A closed world – dense, familiar, overwhelming – where you grow too fast or not at all.

I was the child my aunts, my older cousins, and even my friends’ mothers would pull into conversations about family issues, relationships, and everyday problems.

My teacher called me “the sharpened tongue”, not because I was rude, but because I refused to be shaped into someone softer, quieter, more acceptable.

Sometimes, I slipped into the moments that reminded me I was a child – like sewing tiny clothes for my Barbies with my cousins.

But usually, I hovered somewhere between the world of children who didn’t quite understand me and the world of adults whose conversations I somehow understood.

The world calling

On Fridays, my family used to drive from our neighbourhood in as-Sudaniya down the coastal al-Rashid Street to Rafah – about an hour’s drive.

One of those days, Gaza felt less like a cage, more like a home.

I was 12, and my siblings and I joked about old memories – the way my brother used to mispronounce words, the tiny disasters that became inside jokes only we understood.

We didn’t wander far from my parents, talking and laughing, then walking to the shore as the smell of spiced fish and the cool sea breeze wrapped the day in something warm and familiar.

They aren’t grand memories, just mine.

I always knew I would leave. I remember a family gathering when every girl my age was asked where she planned to study – in Gaza, they meant, naming local universities as if the question had no other geography.

When it was my turn, I blurted: “Study in Gaza? I’m going abroad. I’ll be a journalist like my father.”

Some people encouraged me. Others laughed. But I already felt the world outside calling.

When I left Gaza in 2019 at 17 to study international relations, it was the first time I flew on my own, and because I was under 18, I carried a court document permitting me to travel alone.

At the Rafah crossing, I stood between my father and older brother, Omar, memorising their faces.

Once I crossed into Egypt, long hours of waiting rooms and security checks began, the quiet panic of not knowing whether my name would be called to go through or be sent back.

Cairo Airport, then Istanbul, and finally Cyprus – each stop a threshold I had to pass.

At every airport, I was pulled aside for extra searches because of my black passport. Officers asked why I was travelling alone, where I was going, what I planned to study – ordinary questions to them that felt like tests I had to pass to earn a life outside the only world I knew.

‘You’re not in Gaza anymore’

My first night in Cyprus, I slept more deeply than I ever had in my life.

When I woke to a loud sound, my body panicked, as if it were an explosion. I ran into the corridor only to find suitcase wheels dragging across the floor.

Then my mind caught up with my body: You’re not in Gaza anymore.

That morning, I wandered the dorms looking for a mini market. Someone told me it was in the basement, but I got lost in the corridors, trying to buy an adapter and some toast.

Everything felt unfamiliar – especially the silence.

Nothi