Letters to a Friend Who Doesn’t Know the Meaning of War.

is a series of prose-poetic letters and a living testimony from the author, written in the heart of war. Addressed not to one person, but to the whole world — to those who have never known the sound..

Letter Seven: When Fear Came to Us

My friend,
this time, it was not I who went to the war...
but the war that came to me,
carried in my sister’s eyes,
and in the trembling of her children’s fingers.

That day,
the door knocked at noon.
I opened it to find my sister,
with three children clinging to her
the way souls cling to one another
when there is nowhere else to survive.

She had come from Khan Younis.
That place the occupation had not yet begun to empty by force,
but where the bombing, as she described,
was hysterical, deranged,
knowing nothing of logic, nothing of life.

She could not bear it.
She gathered her children,
took a car toward “a safer place”—
if such a name can still be spoken.

She told me:
“I kept whispering the shahada the whole way, me and the driver,
while I held them close against me.”

She said it quietly,
as though recounting a dream,
but I could see in her eyes
the traces of the road...
the wreckage,
the mothers who did not make it out,
the dread that this journey might be the last.

She described the road to me.
Every corner bore witness to something broken:
torn walls,
burned cars,
bodies beneath blankets that hid nothing of the truth.

My heart turned over as she spoke—
not only because I heard of destruction,
but because it reached me this time in its full shape:
in a bag stuffed with children’s clothes,
in an innocent question:
“Will we sleep here tonight?”

Our home,
which had seemed somehow “safer,”
was now crowded with fear brought from afar,
with eyes that had not closed for days,
with voices whispering each night:
“Will we survive here too?
Or must we be ready to leave again?”

My friend,
my sister was not the first to be displaced.
But she was the first to make me realize
that safety here is only a temporary stage,
that reassurance is fragile,
and it trembles with every suitcase
that arrives from elsewhere.

Stay where you are,
where no one knocks at your door
carrying fear in their eyes.

—Ruba
from a house that has become a transit station
for postponed survival.

_________________________________________

"Letters to a Friend Who Doesn’t Know the Meaning of War"is a series of prose-poetic letters and a living testimony from the author, written in the heart of war.Addressed not to one person, but to the whole world — to those who have never known the sound of airstrikes or the silence of rubble. These letters speak of survival, loss, and love in ruins — and of a language that says what history cannot.