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I was born long after the walls crumbled. After the fig trees were razed, the names of villages became footnotes or forgotten. And yet, I wake with dirt beneath my fingernails — soil I’ve never touched, which stains me still.

The ghosts I carry are not made of mist or memory. They are made of silence. Of doorways left open too long. Of women who speak in fragments. My grandmother, Fatmeh, never told me the story of her escape — not in the way one tells a tale, beginning to end. She said it in the way her voice caught when a child cried out in the street. She would pause at the window when sirens passed, her body still as though listening for a sound older than her heartbeat.

What she didn’t say taught me more than anything else.

I have inherited a fear that doesn’t belong to me — and yet it lives in me with the intimacy of blood. It arrives unannounced in waiting rooms and border crossings. In questions about where I’m from and what I mean by that. It is not loud; it’s subterranean. It pulses. It waits.

When people speak of the Nakba, they speak of loss — of land, of home, of a particular geography of the heart. But they do not say, or perhaps cannot say, that some of us were born in that aftermath like plants growing through cracks in the concrete, resilient and determined despite the harsh conditions and the odds stacked against us — misshapen, reaching toward a sun we’ve never seen.

My childhood was threaded with absences, conversations that stopped when I entered the room, and laughter that sounded rehearsed. I was taught, gently and without words, that survival depends on discretion, on knowing when to swallow your name, and on knowing which parts of you are safest hidden.

It’s a strange inheritance, fear. Unlike gold or land deeds, it doesn’t gleam. It moulds itself into the posture, how you speak to authority, and how you scan a room for exits. It lives in the body, soft tissue, and organs that never forget.

And yet, there is also love. Fierce, unrelenting love is the kind that tucks you in with stories that end in exile and still find a way to rhyme. The kind that teaches you to cook with your hands, to season grief with cumin and oil. The kind that makes language out of fragments, out of everything they tried to erase. This love, more powerful than fear, is a force of transformation, a light in the darkness.

I do not write this to mourn what I never had. I write because the ghosts deserve names. Silence, too, can be a kind of violence. I believe the body remembers what the mouth forgets and that stories—even fractured ones—can be a way back to something like wholeness. Giving voice to these ghosts and acknowledging their presence is a powerful act of empowerment.

To grow up with ghosts is not to be haunted—it is to be taught, shaped, sharpened, and perhaps, one day, free. This journey, marked by fear and silence, is also a testament to resilience, a beacon of hope for those who carry their own ghosts.

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