A professor at the American University of Beirut, writer and Rusted Radishes editor Rima Rantisi captures the anxiety and uncertainty that define Israel’s ongoing assault on Lebanon, painting a vivid picture of the conflict’s impact on everyday life.
Rima Rantisi
October 11, 2024 (Anxiety)
I wake up with the same sticky dread I woke up with a year ago when Gaza started. It manifests in my throat, the previous day’s atrocities stuck there like a mottled ball of news. Every day I feel slightly different. Last night, a residential building in Noueiri toppled into rubble from an Israeli strike. How many children were being tucked into their beds? How many dishes had yet to be washed after dinner? Then without warning, they were all under the rubble. I cannot shake this suddenness, the endless stream of cruelty. Leo hears us talking and asks, “Why would they hit Beirut?” His eyes are searching our faces. Until recently, the war has been far away – in Gaza or in the south. He gave up Starbucks a year ago because his sister told him about Palestine/Israel and that, according to TikTok, Starbucks funds Israel. I can see his eight-year-old mind turning: How did the war make it here now? When I put him to sleep, I lay down next to him, we cuddle, talk a bit and say good night. This is our new routine. I can’t stand how much I love him and the soft round features of his face. I pray that my anxiety doesn’t rub off on him.
The weight of time, the slow passing of another day of war, the sound of war planes, the endlessness, and the increasing cruelty are no less than torture. I had a ticket to go to the US a few days ago and wait out the war there, but I canceled it. The simple answer is that my life is here. I don’t feel I have to explain it further. But I long for a normal, routine life in a place where the only thing overhead is the sunlight streaming down through the trees instead of drones and airplanes scouting for their next kill. Yesterday’s hit will be advertised in today’s papers as a “targeted assassination.” But from here we see that far more civilians are killed than combatants or Hezbollah members: To take one person out, they have no problem taking out an entire building or an entire city block. Every bombing feels like a new turning point, an escalation. How does anyone know who is in their building? Everyone talks about this while also acknowledging how problematic it is to fear the displaced people who have sought refuge in their buildings or in a nearby school. But still: Who might be hiding amongst them?
The electricity company bill collector slips the bill through the slit in the front door. I open it to make a snide remark about the “electricity.” It hasn’t come in 10 days. I tell him, “Whether it comes or not, we’re made to pay.” He chuckles. He says it hasn’t been coming because the wire/cord/pipe that supplies this side of the city was destroyed in a bombing in Dahieh and no one has been able to go there and fix it because the bombs keep dropping. Then he tells us he was displaced from Dahieh and his house is gone. My heart drops. He says it was a family building and that none of them has anything to do with Hezbollah. They have no idea why it was hit. He left with just the clothes on his back. I ask if I can give him some clothes — or anything. He says, “No no, we are not going to beg.”
I go to Achrafieh to a community center to volunteer with friends, preparing food for the displaced. I haven’t done any relief work so far because I’ve been frozen with anxiety. And rage. Since 2019, as Lebanon experienced a series of disasters, from an economic collapse to the port explosion, we residents had to take on the job of an absent government. We have cooked and fundraised and organized and swept the shattered glass of an entire city and pinched our liras and fought with every institution we once trusted. And now, with the potential war having been telegraphed for an entire year, the powers that be haven’t been able to offer a single lira or bunker? The disaster at hand is so much bigger than us, and I find myself so small in front of it. I see friends and acquaintances on social media fundraising for mattresses and blankets and transporting them and feeding people. I love them for it. But I am exhausted.
Anyway, I go. We fill plastic containers with pasta for pickup to feed unnamed people who are sitting in schools or streets, their homes far or gone. I keep wondering if they’ll like the food. I told Fady to meet me there and he gets stuck frying eggplant. We usually joke around and chat, but now we have little to say. I fall into despair. The faces around me don’t look like they did during the past catastrophes, which felt manageable at least; I was always moved by the solidarity and knew that to a certain extent this solidarity is what kept the country alive and kept its people going. Unlike this catastrophe, which threatens to slowly tear us apart. We hear a boom, and everyone pauses, looks around. When the second one comes a few beats later, we know it’s a sonic boom. Still, someone wants confirmation. Someone else checks online and it’s confirmed. Everyone breathes. I feel a cry rising from behind my eyes, my throat.
I meet another volunteer who is sitting with Samar. We sit in the courtyard when we are done packing the pasta. She says she sent her kids to school this week, just down the road. I perk up — normal news. Proof of life. I remember I am small, though I don’t feel like it, and that there are millions of other people here with their kids trying to get through the days too. Leo is just inside the center, very happily soaking up hours of YouTube time as his school hasn’t opened yet. Samar has to manage the more complicated demands of her teenagers who want to go out at night to see their friends. She’s trying to figure out how to settle this argument. She has been strong and resolute all day, but now she lets out a weak cry. “I’m so scared.”
The MK Israeli surveillance drone, or, its nickname, “Im Kamel,” is buzzing above us. The name harkens back to the civil war days, but surely the technology has been updated, so is it still Im Kamel? Rayya says something that settles in me like black smoke. “They’re going to let them do this to us, aren’t they?”
In between everything, my brain plays out the year-long reel of broken and shattered Palestinian and Lebanese bodies. I see people under rubble. I see the woman’s legs I saw yesterday, the ones that fell out of the back of a truck in Gaza. I had looked closer to make sure I’d seen correctly. I had. I had. When I get home, I lie on the carpet, my knees slightly tucked. I let my body sink into the ground and try to forget.
October 12, 2024 (Denial)
Today, I am with Rami and the kids in the north, where there are no bombs and no Im Kamels. The perceived sense of safety we had in Ras Beirut was shattered by this last massacre in Noueiri. Rami doesn’t feel the danger — maybe he’s in denial — and would prefer to stay home, but he agreed to go last night because my anxiety was crushing me. I would have preferred to stay home too if anything was normal. As we drove out last night, all I thought about was where the next bomb would fall, perhaps on our car. But people are out on the streets, sitting outside their shops. There is something of a denial, or just a refusal to stop living.
We picked Layla up from her mom’s in Achrafieh. The four of us hadn’t been together in months. As soon as we were on the Jal el Dib highway, my body relaxed, and my appetite piqued. Everyone else said they were hungry too, so we swerved off into Jal al Dib to Swiss Butter. The restaurant was packed and Rami noticed me smiling. I ignored the disconnect between there and the foreboding of Beirut. I just wanted to enjoy dinner with my family.
My mom’s friend in Peoria had offered her home in Chekka to us, so the idea was to spend as much time there as possible to calm our nerves and be close to the sea. We go to Anfeh, which is five minutes away from the house, and sit on chaise longues and order beers and lemonades. We swim in the sea. The October sun is no longer hot, but the sea is still and clear and sparkling and warm. Leo finds fish, and Layla smoothes on her tanning oil and finds a spot in the sun. We each settle into our comforts. We order calamari and fries and cheese rolls. Then we hear a boom. We wait for the next one, but it doesn’t come. And the jets fly overhead. I am confused. We see a nearby table of women, who had just opened a bottle of Prosecco and received a spread of food, scrambling on their phones. They get up and leave. I hadn’t wanted to check the news until later, but now I have to. A strike on Deir Billa on the hillside of the Batroun District, just twenty kilometers from where we are. The first strike on the north since the beginning of the war.
A nebulous voice in my head is reminding me that I can no longer be in denial now about the situation. Everything I’d read in the past year pointed to the fact that Hezbollah and Israel would avoid an all-out war. Lina had been freaking out all year about it happening, and I’d kept telling her, if it was gonna rain it woulda poured. No one wanted a full-on war as it would be too costly on both sides, I’d reassured. But then it happened. Just like the fall of the “untouchable” Lebanese lira (I’d always believed that myth, too). Now I must look reality in the face: the growing evidence that this war is only going to get worse. I don’t want denial to pull me into its gaping mouth. There’s a fine line between denial and optimism, and I don’t think I can distinguish it anymore. Then again, maybe optimism is a form of denial and a sort of coping mechanism. Either way, I fear being blindsided due to denial-optimism so I end up being generally down these days.
For dinner, we go to a popular fish restaurant in Chekka, and it’s completely empty. The owner, a middle-aged woman with soft features and clear eyes, ushers us in and tells us that it’s because of the war and today’s strike, which not only hit the north but hit a building of displaced people in a Christian village. Just like a few weekends ago, when a building in my grandma’s village, Ain el Delb, was surprisingly hit, massacring 70 civilians. “This is a sign that they will hit wherever there are displaced people,” she said. “Israel has always been criminal.”
At dinner, we talk about the possibility of Layla moving with her mom to Dubai if the war worsens. What about the US? She has a green card now, so her dad tells her she could move there with us and get a passport within a year. “It’s too far,” she says. It’s the first time Rami suggests we look for jobs in the US. I am not ready. We’re talking about breaking up the family and leaving our lives, but we don’t reflect on this; it’s just logistical talk.
October 13, 2024 (Depression)
Everyone I speak to today says, “I’m depressed.” I am depressed too, so I don’t have to ask questions, but hearing this does further justify my spiraling, which mirrors the spiraling of the war, including in northern Gaza, where people are being torched in their tents today. Despite our own catastrophe, no one has forgotten Gaza. Meanwhile, our dusty Lebanese politicians are reading from scripts. Suddenly, ever since Nasrallah’s assassination, they have been making statements, realigning their political positions and running to do the only thing they know how to do: accept hundreds of millions in aid.
We go to the sea again today, this time in Chekka itself, to a small sandy beach with shallow water. Only one other family is there, a father with his four kids, splashing and giggling. We take turns throwing Leo into the water, and he keeps asking for more. Slowly, slowly the gloom lifts off my head. Leo makes a sandcastle; Layla takes photos from the ledge of a derelict, sea-eroded building that hugs the beach; I show Rami yoga moves in the sand to relieve the tendinitis he’s been suffering from for the past few months. His face reveals a sweet pain from the stretching while my muscles are loosening, thanking me for finally paying attention to them.
Two ladies walk onto the beach. From the way they walk in casually with just flip flops and towels, it’s clear they live nearby and are beach bums. One of them says shoo hilou about my orange lipstick and how nicely it goes with my blue swimsuit. I take the compliment with a smile; vanity has been the least of my concerns lately. I can’t be bothered to look good during the war, but today something compelled me to wear lipstick — maybe it was the sea, maybe boredom. Maybe my pale face. The compliment’s life is short as the other woman says, “Don’t sit under that building, it crumbles from time to time.” The other one nods her head and gives me an intentional look. I finally look at the building. It’s black from seawater erosion. It is crumbling and cracked everywhere. And my family is sitting underneath it.
Get up get up get up, everyone, move out of the way! I have picked up everything I can, and they are still yawning and making sandcastles and taking photos. Yalla! Rami tells me, “It doesn’t just happen like that.” I have no idea how it happens but what I have learned in the past year and the past month is that rubble can happen at any time in ways you never imagined.
October 14, 2024 (Time)
We leave the north, which I have been referring to as lala land. But as soon as we arrive again in Beirut, we hear news that a building full of displaced people in the northern village of Aitou has been hit by an Israeli strike. Another family friend had offered her place in Aitou but we had settled on Chekka because it was closer, more accessible. There are about 5,000 Lebanese in Peoria, my hometown, and most of them come from Aitou. My Peoria friends and family wake up to the news and circulate videos of the complete destruction. There are human parts sticking out of the rubble, gray and red. Israel perversely attempts to manufacture fear and hatred of the displaced wherever they may flee.
Sara’s words keep coming back to me: I feel as if I’ve wasted my time. She shared this on a group text without elaboration, but we had spent several days in complete uncertainty. In the fall of 2019, when I’d leave Leo with his grandparents in the mountainside so that Rami and I could head down to join the antigovernment protests in Martyr’s Square, there was no sense of wasted time. Being in the street with the mass of bodies was a march toward the future, a moment of stupid optimism, wide-open eyes. When the protests fizzled out and the counterrevolution had its way, I knew that the uprising had changed us all regardless and we had imprinted a moment in history in which everything possible had been revealed. Even if it “failed,” I always felt we gave it our best shot. It was beautiful.
But later, when things fell apart, we did waste time. We spent time writing letters to our institutions — schools, universities, local NGOs, anyone we thought would be willing to re-organize and change — and getting very little out of it. Google docs with words and rounds of edits and meetings to discuss the words and the edits. We endured endless electricity blackouts and finding electricity, bank lines and finding money, cancer and finding chemo, and so much more losing and searching besides. And always, the news. In the meantime, our counterparts in other parts of the world were working on their books in quiet places where the lights were on twenty-four hours a day and the predictability of their calendars contained none of the seismic interruptions of life we’d weathered over the last five years. During that time, they’d bought houses and taken their kids to travel soccer and drank beer on long green lawns. As for us, we pushed past each disaster, our threshold for discomfort increasing, until eventually, as Rima M. said in that same text exchange, we came to require “high adrenaline to operate, or we would die of boredom.”
Those shaved-off pieces of wasted time had to be processed. Together we muddled our way through those unpredictable days while what we were expected to do — produce, work, publish — became secondary. And we learned that’s okay.
In working on this diary, I realize how much happens in a day of war. Besides the constant news of what, where, and who was bombed and the words of the vile combo of Netanyahu and Gallant and Mikati and Naim Qassim and Joe and Kamala, all taking over the precious space of our minds, in war exist the multiple anecdotes of a day beyond the news as well: The neighbor’s texts about her fear of a Hezbollah member hiding amongst the displaced in all the schools and hotels nearby, and what did I think? An ominous warning from the US embassy: “We strongly encourage you to leave now.” The multiple messages saying, “I’m worried about you” from afar, and you wonder what they’ve read or heard that you might not have read or heard yet. The fight you have with your husband because the world around you is collapsing, again, and you have to find new ways through it together.
Before I go to sleep: A young man my students’ age is set on fire by Israeli bombing of civilian tents in northern Gaza. A camera catches him being burned alive. His name is Shaaban. Once again, my feelings all go to the dead or dying. In Palestine, in Lebanon, we are watching a slow burn. In Aitou, 22 people were killed, a massacre. We are the last countries fighting Israel. It’s hard to imagine it will end in our favor, but there are days I believe we will see liberation.
October 15, 2024 (Daily Life)
I’m teaching online now, and my students are scattered across the country and beyond. I try to imagine what it would be like to be twenty and living a war, unable to reach university. The vibe is corona 2.0. Except now no one turns on their video, so you’re speaking to blank squares and overanalyzing your own face. I get annoyed when there is scarce participation and express it. In response, a student opens her mic to say, “Sorry professor, I can’t hear you because the bombing is so loud.” I shrink. Teaching during these times is dystopian. I’ve built my life around teaching and have been in the university environment for the past 25 years as both student and teacher, but now that we know how deep our institutions are in the pockets of Zionists, I fantasize about the dissolution of the university in its present form; maybe it is one of the ways forward past the complexes built with tuition money and endowments. There are so many ways to learn and become educated.
Usually, at this time of the year, we are also finalizing the layout and design of our annual issue of Rusted Radishes. But our student interns are scattered, we are barely working, and all the dates have been pushed. Zeina and I have been working on the journal for the past five years, through all the catastrophes — thawra, corona, inhiyar, infijar, genocide. Now she has moved to the mountainside and has been keeping to herself, but today she is “back,” and her return gives me a dose of normalcy and purpose. Through work and friendship, we can’t help but shape the lens through which we see and live the catastrophes. I have included everyone’s names in this diary because I have not lived the past five years alone. This is part of the reason it’s difficult to extricate oneself from the environment — as shitty as it may be — because no one can understand except those who lived it with you.
In other news:
Bombings in Beirut seem to be de-escalating. US sends a letter to Israel urging humanitarian aid be allowed into Gaza. The US embassy sends an email to citizens in Lebanon offering spots on MEA flights. MEA is a hero now. Israel announces it will hit military sites in Iran, not oil or nuclear. I talk to Lina and Tania via WhatsApp about Huda Beauty eyeshadow because we want to de-Zionize our makeup collection. I smile without straining. Daily life things matter again. I go to sleep and hear no bombs.
October 16, 2024 (Defenses)
Leo went back to school with the portion of students who could attend in person. The rest are learning online. He was bubbling over with excitement in the morning about seeing his friends. Three weeks ago, the day the war escalated in Lebanon, he had woken up resisting getting out of bed because he “hates school.” He had been saying it since the first week, and I was getting worried as to why, to the point where I’d written a note to the teacher. I told him that not everyone gets to go to school and that if he’s not going it means something is wrong. I reminded him of his luck today as half the country’s students are unable to attend school.
Yesterday the news was that the Lebanese government received guarantees from the US government that there would be de-escalation in Beirut. It had been six days since it had been struck. The nightly terrors that the city endured with the constant bombardment on Dahieh, which echoes up into parts of the nearby mountains, came to a halt. But then less than 24 hours after the news of de-escalation, Israel bombed Dahieh this morning. Then when I checked the news (my heart squeezing before having to digest the atrocities), I saw IOF soldiers detonate an entire village in the south, Mhaybib, and that they had bombed the municipal building in Nabatieh, killing the mayor and other municipal workers and volunteers who were feeding people and doing their duty by those who stayed in their homes despite the IOF’s evacuation orders, which appear as nothing more than attempts to cleanse the area and re-occupy the south.
The news is beyond horrible and Im Kamel is still buzzing over our heads, but my anxiety levels are low today. Maybe it’s because Leo’s in school. Maybe I got used to the situation. Maybe my defenses have strengthened. Maybe I just want to enjoy the autumn wind blowing through my kitchen as I cook. This is my favorite time of year. I listen to the Maabar podcast while I make fassoulya and rice, in which journalists recount stories of their experiences during the Lebanese civil war. One of them mentions his PTSD symptoms but how he didn’t have the language at the time to identify them as such. He only knew that nature was the remedy to ease his anxiety. The mountains, the sea. My friend George Azar, a war photographer, is featured in the podcast. He tells another near-death story. I jump in the middle of listening as a boom shakes the house. I walk into the family room and look out the window, waiting for the second boom to indicate it was a sonic boom, not a bomb. After a long five seconds, it comes.
Later, at my friend’s house, there are professional massages, manicure-pedicures, fine wine, salmon, and cards. Luxury as war salve. The massage releases all the tensions in my body. Rima M’s migraine dissipates.
Afterwards, there’s a debate about whether Hezbollah should wave the white flag or continue to resist. We are divided. We are still formulating our political language around this war and the future.
October 17, 2024 (Anniversaries)
Today is the fifth anniversary of the Lebanese uprising. On the night it erupted, I was attending a play called The Belle of Amherst, a one-woman show based on the life of Emily Dickinson. I was surrounded by my women colleagues from AUB whose phones flashed breaking news in the dark of the theater. Suddenly we found ourselves in between worlds. Our university lives collided with fires and mayhem in the street. A group of us who were at the play hopped in Firas and Nour’s SUV and sped home through paths of burning dumpsters only to watch, on television, the uprising beginning to unfold. We spent the next months on the street, believing we could change everything.
Anyway, today no one cares. October 17, 2019, is many revelations ago.
Another anniversary: Today is the one-year anniversary of Al-Ahli Hospital bombing in Gaza. It was ten days after the war on Gaza had started, and a huge red Breaking News band had splashed across the screen. Nearly 500 people dead. It was the first major reckoning with Israel’s “limits” and the absence of the international community’s “red lines.” Surely, we thought at the time, the bombing of a hospital filled with critically-injured patients, a hospital sheltering hundreds of displaced people would not be tolerated. Israel quickly lied and said it was a Hamas missile that misfired, hitting the hospital. By the time the story was debunked no one cared anymore. Hospitals were fair targets from that day forward. Since then, nearly all of Gaza’s hospitals have been destroyed. In Lebanon, they have also hit several, leaving them debilitated or entirely closed.
It’s also the one-month anniversary of the pager attacks against “Hezbollah operatives.” Who could forget that day? I’d been teaching, and more than one student was staring at their phone. I began lecturing them about the precious time that university offers, their one chance, stop wasting it on the phone… And then: Professor, people are blowing up. I barely understood what happened by the time class ended. “I love you!” I called out after them in a moment of despair. I then went to meet Lina C. at Taht el Shajra, ambulances screaming past us for an hour. As I write, I realize that in the café that day, our futures had already been written, blowing up and screaming around us, while we carried on discussing the details of our lives, holding on to one more hour of normalcy.
By the end of today, one more anniversary is created: Hamas’ leader and mastermind of October 7, Yahya Sinwar, has been confirmed dead.
These anniversaries remind us of our processing, or lack thereof (I still cannot fathom the pager attack — how it was dressed in Hollywood regalia, blowing off people’s eyes and fingers as if these appendages were mere nuisances). How has time passed (slowly, painfully)? What did or didn’t happen since (our whole belief systems shifted)? How much more cynical I have become (a lot, but despite my fear of being caught unaware, I still manage to maintain a stupid optimism that defeats my desperation on most days).
In my youth, growing up in Illinois, though bits and pieces of the Lebanese civil war trickled into our comfortable American lives, war itself was an abstraction. I couldn’t feel or hear the reverberations of the bombs or smell death. I couldn’t sense the loss of home or time when packing a car to go to another part of the country. I was spared the fear of daily uncertainty.
October 18, 2024 (Opposing Sides)
Today the news is all about Sinwar. I go to Rino’s for a haircut. The news is on — clips of Sinwar and his speech and analysts asking if this indicates the beginning of the end of the war(s) since Netanyahu has been sharpening his fangs all year, hoping to sink them into Sinwar. An infinite re-run of Sinwar’s final act dominates the screen — tossing a stick at the death machine that finds him armless and near death. Now half the internet hails him as a hero fighting on the front lines; the other half sees him as a pathetic remnant of a terrorist organization.
I want blond hair, and Rino isn’t having it. His eyes go wide as he explains the upkeep that will go into it. I’m thinking platinum, no less. A wild change that takes me out of myself but that is also closer to the reality — because under my dyed brown hair is a head full of gray. All right, what about silver? Same story. Rino tells me that I actually don’t have gray hair in the back of my head, so there is no need to go silver. I end up settling for a few highlights in my bangs to brighten the gloom in my face. It does the trick.
I wind through the busy streets of Burj Hammoud, one of my favorite places. Leather belts and sujuk and pork and loads of candy wrapped in shiny paper and clothing boutiques are tucked away in this alley and that. A riot of electricity wires snakes along the walls of old buildings and above packed streets. Nothing has visibly changed here during the war.
In my youth, growing up in Illinois, though bits and pieces of the Lebanese civil war trickled into our comfortable American lives, war itself was an abstraction. I couldn’t feel or hear the reverberations of the bombs or smell death. I couldn’t sense the loss of home or time when packing a car to go to another part of the country. I was spared the fear of daily uncertainty. It was like an abstract painting where the content remained frozen within a frame, stuck in time, open to interpretation. Now there is the constant smell of burning in the air, the sound and pressure from a bomb that fills your body, the eerie normalcy of walking through a neighborhood you’ve long loved, the sea of new people displaced in your neighborhood, the sinking feeling you get when you hear someone is leaving, the heart stopping when someone calls, the uncertainty about anything that might happen in the future, even minutes from now. Like on the battlefield, the state of mind in a war is also the battlefield between opposing sides. You bristle at your changed neighborhoods as you empathize with those ripped from their homes. Do you allow yourself to feel joy amidst so much misery? Should you stay or should you go? But unlike the battlefield, your life doesn’t always appear visibly different, even while it shudders under the pressure.
We have dinner with friends on the mountainside. From the terrace, my eyes absorb the endless outlines of mountains ahead of us, a fiery sunset, and pine trees. The sky changes from fire to pink and blue pastels to dark night with Venus twinkling above. War takes a backseat to the barbecue and cold wine. Being with friends during the war lightens the loneliness of its pall. Some of us say we are no longer scared. But no one knows why. No one wants to say that it’s because we’ve normalized it, have learned its contours and who and where will be targeted, and that those people and places are not us. Late into the night, I talk about how the family group sent a video of my nephews and nieces cheering on the cross-country runner who was going to the state championship. He walked down a long hallway where the entire school, from first grade on up, flanked the hallway and clapped and cheered.
I felt a pang when I saw that video; it reminded me of my stable childhood, filled with moments like these, where kids mostly cared about what happened at school, not what happened in the warzone their country has become. What if I’m depriving my son from the opportunity of knowing stability and its gifts, away from the catastrophes that have dominated his short life? Zeina swears that growing up here shapes you in interesting ways. Lina recently cried as she talked about her childhood during the war, nearly begging me to spare Leo. Rami is angry and irritated; he has seen this too many times. Pisha texts me every day from Vermont, having lived her childhood inside the civil war, her trauma seeping back in. I don’t know what the right answer is but I will follow Leo’s cues. Right now, he has already begun forming a political sensibility. He takes the limited news he hears from us in stride, asks questions when he is curious. He is eating well and appears in good moods, unlike his father at his age during the war. The future is wide open — we do not know what day after we will see. But for now, we are picking at the life in front of us; it’s not the way we want it to be, but it’s ours.
Exquisitely expressed. Thank you, Rima.
Thank you for writing this.
Justice will be served one day. They will not get away with these atrocious cruelties.
Pitch perfect. Thank you for capturing! Elise (Lisa)