notes of a non-combatant

precipice

The air conditioner rumbles, offering white noise to drown out all of the sounds from the street, as well as cool air to offset the midday heat and give me a solid day without sweating, perhaps the first in a long time. Laying on a king size bed in nothing but a pair of boxers while two flies dance freely around me and land all over my body, I find myself staring blankly at the computer screen, thinking of little more than the soft tickle of the insects crawling across my skin. I have barely been out of the Gaza Strip for twenty four hours and have a little less than twenty four more hours before boarding a flight back to America. Today is limbo.

The past few days have been so busy, each day full of new and exciting events, full of depressing and heavy moments, and even sometimes quite scary and confusing experiences. Each day has been full of meetings, events, lectures, tours, and talks, with barely enough downtime to get much else done. Nights have not offered much solid sleep, as they were either cropped short to accommodate a busy, early-morning schedule, or because the heavy rumble of artillery shelling could be heard and felt throughout each night and well into the mornings. Even having left the Gaza Strip with the arduous journey back to Cairo, wonderfully large beds cannot make up for the emotions that throw off my sleeping pattern, whether its excitement that keeps me up at night, or anxiety attacks that refuse to let me keep food in my stomach.

I take out my notes, copious amounts of scribbles scrawled across the backs of handouts and information packets given to us on the delegation, or terse words and basic information concisely written in my notebook. Sentences outlining the events, reactions, occurrences, and emotions that happened each day in the Gaza Strip. I glance over the words written in flowing black ink, thankful that I spent the time to jot down so much information, extremely worried that an event would be forgotten, or perhaps a detail undocumented. If I could sit next to myself and observe my robotic recollection of my time spent with the delegation, I would laugh insultingly in my own face.

Memory isn’t a drawer with pages stashed in it. Emotions aren’t salt and pepper shakers, lightly dashed over a plate to flavor an occasion. Memory is a pliable material that has marks left upon it, or in this case, burned and seared in it. Emotions aren’t grains placed in dainty containers waiting for the right moment to present themselves, rather they float about in a sea of events and sit patiently at any dam or backlog, waiting to overflow, burst the dams, and flood.

My eyes well up until I take deep breaths, letting the dry and dusty air evaporate my tears. I give myself time, as I have done for the past seven days, pacing myself and how I process the things I have seen and heard, the people with which I have made friendships and parted ways with. I only hope I can peg the past week onto paper before my memories and emotions flood and escape from me. I would laugh in my face if I could see myself now, as I’m sure there are going to be many more sleepless nights through which I’ll be wishing I could forget what has happened in the Gaza Strip. And yet right now, I’m afraid to forget what it feels like to be there, because even though it is seared in my memory, it is all beginning to feel like it was only a bad dream.