Dear self,
I hope this letter reaches you.
I decided to write down my sensory and bodily reflections during the expansion of the aggression in March 2026, as if throwing a lifeline from the self of mine dwelling in a threatened time, to you, wherever you will be, in another time.
Mind
Beirut, 2 March 2026
Three missiles woke me terrified. It felt as though I had leapt in a single quick movement to the entrance, carrying a pillow over my head to protect me. One second of silence passed. I looked at the pillow and wondered: Why am I holding this? Why am I standing in the corner by the entrance to the house? The ground shook again with three more missiles. I crouched down once more, sheltering beneath the pillow.
I am not sure when I realised they were missiles from the Israeli enemy, and that the war had “returned”…
I had never asked myself what I was doing before a new wave of war expanded. Did my body sense it? The way animals sense an earthquake, or a tsunami? Even if my body did sense it through the constant sound of drones and the accumulated memory of a body living within an ongoing war, perhaps somewhere in my unconscious I was preparing for it. But my state, or my presence, was settled in consciousness, so of course I was not ready. I was in denial. Or perhaps it was not so much a state of denial as a state of survival. As though, if I wanted to save myself, I had to forget that war was a constant, enduring possibility.
The day before the war renewed and expanded, my heart was overflowing with sadness. I smelled war. I spoke about a soundscape polluted and occupied by the roar of drones.
Fear
“Dear self:
The heart and death, the heart and the palate, are bound by a palpable connection through a mysterious, coded network. An invisible movement passes between them, a movement hiding among fluid tissues, carrying secrets that time cast behind it and left.
When the heart shatters…
The pulse slows… wears down… falls… tires… and dreams… It wakes startled, frightened, terrified… I watch myself in an image blurred, torn, confused, distorted…
Sometimes moving and sometimes rigid, as if I were a momentary error in a system of life repeating forever… Inside an abyss whose bottom takes too long to find, my body turns through postures chewed by exhaustion and fatigue… A chasm that has lost its boundaries between life and death… I witness my own collapse inside a stiffened, hardened body,
a body pinned behind fast-moving screens that neither reach nor connect with the warmth of my forgotten insides… With hollow eyes inhabited by an emptiness that neither begins nor ends…
staring into layers of ice settled over the heart, gripping the life of the pulse…”
Qsarnaba, 8 April 2026
I woke terrified. It was not the sound of airstrikes or drones, or the neighbours screaming, but the constant anxiety occupying my stomach. I stood, my mind still sailing through the unconscious; on a broken body I stood. My knees trembled and I fell back onto the bed. I was no longer sure I could control my body. I dream of crying.
I close my eyes and leave for the places where dreams live…
A house open with no doors, a hill overlooking the Central Bekaa plain, a storeroom of forgotten and neglected thoughts, illuminated tunnels underground, a sea whose waters freeze at night and melt at sunrise, an old house full of the memory of addiction, a building overlooking another building; love lives in one and a murderous criminal in the other, the map of blood on my menstrual pad, a futuristic city surrounded by bodies of water and freshwater springs, a crossing, a hidden room in my house that I visit for the first time, a shroud-making workshop, an inner prison and an outer prison, a secret basement beneath my house, the restaurant market and the seedling market, the city of the human-beast, a street filled with stranded cars and a sky occupied by drones, a Bongisi pyramid drawn in graffiti on a demolished wall…
When I saw the pyramid, my stomach loosened for a moment. I remembered a time when I could sleep without fear. The pyramid sits in the space between my stomach and my viscera. I glimpse a golden light coming out of my intestines. I exhale. I feel my breath stretching through my spine, like a “light inside my body”, reaching an “opening inside my brain”, and I wonder: Is this “pleasure inside the universe”? Or is it “pleasure inside pain”?
A Bongisi pyramid. Beside it, a key inside a key inside a key. Then, unexpectedly, I see my shadow standing before me. My heart tightens amid a mixture of feelings, surprise, fear, love, familiarity, as though I have known him since the beginning of time. He carries me and moves with me, lightly, carefully.
He says to me in a calm, deep voice: “There is a prison inside a prison inside a prison. And if you enter the smaller prison inside the larger one, you will know how to manage. You must.”
I say to him: “Imagine with me: two bodies dancing through movements free of postures of submission. They breathe deeply from one position to the next. The dance stretches on through silence and stillness.”
He says: “Between love and disappearance, many rituals take shape. Cast your soul into the heart of the storm.”
I say to him: “In the middle, naked, he writes his last wishes from time to time, weaving them over the wheel of life. He grows, grows proud, and takes his place above the plains and valleys of the soul. I sat beneath the rain watching him, watching his slow and precise movement. My jealousy hurts.”
He says: “I see magical fingers moving from among a gathering of goddesses, merciful and fierce. They reach out from the embrace of pain, weaving and knitting between my bone and skin a web of threads made from sunlight. They whisper to me: Live in my heart, and listen to the emptiness of my loneliness.”
I ask him: “Is there a bottom to this abyss?”
He says: “From the edges of pain, dusk splits open. From the heart of love, dawn appears.”
I embraced him, closed my eyes, and tried to stretch that moment as he lowered me back to the ground…
Body
Dear self,
I meant to write to you from the middle of a present that stretches and spreads, in suspended time. To you, in a past lodged inside the vortex of a threatened time. But I forgot. Until you appeared in my dream, carrying the map of survival in your hands.
You whispered to me in the dream: “Deep within an imprint inhabited by all voices, every voice has a memory, every voice a smell, every voice a land, every voice eternal threads that dance and pull towards one another around the aura of the body, sailing between past, present, and future. In every land, a body. An ancient body, as old as the earth.”
Dear self, when dreams whisper the secrets of the day and reveal the hidden cellars of fear, bodies made of ether begin to move. They roam the world, embrace tears, remind us that destinies live somewhere between aura and bone.
No-place, at the hour before dawn:
There is no way to sleep. Waves of burning acid have poured over my lungs like volcanic lava. I tried to get up, but my body was pinned in a posture of stillness and paralysis. I watched myself through the eyes of one of the human-beast creatures, watching my body eagerly, waiting for the moment it could pounce on me and devour me. I closed my eyes, wishing to disappear, and wondered: “Has it become ordinary for these creatures to spread among us? Has it become normal for hovering eyes to occupy our skies, watching our bodies, determining our actions and movements? Have we become prisoners of these human-beast creatures? Do we live according to their will? How do we cross this moment?”
I opened my eyes. The creature was gone.
I felt a renewed strength inside my body. I stood and found a stick in my hands. I walked two steps and felt a ghostly presence.
I left my bedroom and saw a new room in my house, one I did not know. Again I heard the ghosts moving above me. I became angry. I entered the new room and heard their laughter behind me. My anger grew, and I screamed with everything I had: “You’re going to keep hiding, coward? Come on, I’m here. Come show me your strength.”
I felt my scream chasing fear as I walked from room to room. It was as if my body had grown larger, my aura had expanded, my heartbeat had spread through the space, and my voice had pierced the walls.
I opened my eyes…
A strange dream…
I felt the warmth of my tears running down my face, my heart beating fast. It had been a long time since my soul had been quenched by a warm liquid.
I sat behind my desk and began to write:
“Is this the curse? To carry, somewhere between my heartbeat and my breathing, the weight of memory and the weight of dreams? Or is it the weight of tears that drowns me and keeps me from being present before myself?
Between one war and another, between 22 November 2024 and 14 April 2026, that is, between one so-called ‘ceasefire’ and the next, I sit, I stand, I stretch out, I squat, I walk, I jog, I cry, I sit, I beg, I exercise, I moan, I touch, I dream, I breathe, I mourn, I relax, I stand, I move, I wake, I sob, I sleep, I run, I relax, I panic, I exercise, I sit, and I dance…
All of it is useless. Nothing transforms or changes. It is as though I am performing one single bodily act, stretching from one moment to another, one day to another, one month to another, one year to another.
Three times within a period of no-time: the time of war, the (non) ceasefire, the end of war.
What is the boundary between them? Does fear taste different from one of these times to another? In which of them do I find myself? In what spacetime do I find my body?
Its separation from my mind has become almost inevitable. There is a triangle: mind, body, fear. I cannot find myself inside my mind, my body, and my fear all at once.”
Dear self,
When I sit behind my desk and write, a golden light moves inside my intestines. Warm, like a sun that has only just risen. Its softness touches the pain, and its threads lift it, stretching into a web that casts itself outward until it reaches love; the witness, the one that endures, the one that resists.
When I write, I remember, and the light thickens. It pierces the hollow of my body and travels towards the centre of the desk, piercing that too, passing through it until it reaches the heart of the notebook. There, it glows, golden threads gathering us together.
My dear self…
I want to hear my mind, so I may belong…
to listen to my fear, so I may be quenched…
to attend to my body, so I may come into view.
