Voices rise in the place, cameras swing to the sound of quick and slow footsteps, feet collide with each other, tender bodies follow one another, the ambulance door is still open to the endless screams, the white cloth is now on the road and will cover nine fresh lilies.
In modern mythology: Yahya, Rakan, Raslan, Gibran, Eve, Rifan, Saydin, Luqman, and Sidra, all crowd into the throat of the physician, Alaa Al-Najjar, the mother, who split the light after her eyes were surprised by what squeezed the soul nine times in a row, without a single breath rising between them.
Her sobs reached for dozens of kilometers, as she gathered the picture in front of her. I could almost feel her heart breaking piece by piece, as she passed through the corridors of her consciousness to the first examination when she discovered she was pregnant with her firstborn son, to the umbilical cord, the first embrace, the birth certificate, the succession of years, the first words, the first steps, and then the dreams that were not fulfilled, to the last breaths.
Now she washes them away with her tears, after counting their ribs one last time, dividing the tremors equally between them, one tremor for this one and one for that one, in an ontological scene that is being torn apart on her arms. Can she vomit out her sadness? Is there a heart sufficient for all this pain?
The place is so narrow it's suffocating, it doesn't have room for her massacre. She runs in her white robe soaked in blood and tragedy from one wall to another, from one corridor to another, as if she were a button from a torn shirt on the sidewalk of life. She tries to revive her senses to comprehend what happened to the sleeping bodies, and the voices of the paramedics still echo in the depths of her ears: children, remains, they are brothers, and once again the arranged and distorted words rise, all of them failing to come up with a clear sentence that reformulates the meanings.
She screams hundreds of times, and here she is prevented from reaching the stretcher, and she sees the combined hands slipping from hers, and her eyes are scattered with the globe of the earth and all its creatures, remains, and fossil remains, but she sees nothing but ashes.
Now she's looking up... and vomiting up the whole world.
OPINIONS
Mon 26 May 2025 9:26 am - Jerusalem Time





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Alaa Al-Najjar looks up, vomiting up the world