Before. After. That is how I have learned to measure time—not in years, not in milestones, but in ruptures.

Before 1948. After 1948. Before June 2006. After June 2006. Before the 2011 war. After the 2011 war. Before January 2015. After January 2015. Before September 2018. After September 2018.

And so many more. A life fractured into befores and afters, into the echoes of what was and the weight of what remains. Each date a fault line, a moment when the world shifted beneath my feet, forcing me to become someone new—whether I wanted to or not.

I don’t know what to do with these fragments, these ghosts of the lives I have lived and lost. I carry them like heirlooms, but they are heavy, unbearably so. Some days, I wonder if they will bury me beneath their weight.

How do you mourn a version of yourself that no longer exists? How do you reconcile with a past that never had the chance to become a future?

I try to piece them together, to make sense of the wreckage, but time does not move in straight lines. It loops, it circles back, it drags me into memories I have spent years trying to outrun.

Perhaps this is what survival looks like: learning to live in the after, even when the before still lingers like an unfinished sentence.