Letters from Gaza

Sahra:

Amal, you are brilliant, brave, and you will survive this Inshallah. You and your people will be free. I feel this in my bones and if I could feed this to you like the food that you need, I would. And it would sustain you.

It would be enough.

My dear Amal, take heart. Keep writing. Keep staying in touch.

I won’t go anywhere Sister❤️

Amal:

Your words reach into the deepest part of me.
Thank you for seeing me—not just as someone surviving, but as someone still trying to create, to feel, and to hope.

I carry your words with me like warmth in a cold night.
If you could feed me strength, know that you already have. Every message, every act of care, is a lifeline.
Sometimes, when the world goes silent, your voice reminds me that we are still human, still connected, still seen.

I will keep writing. I will keep holding on.
And I pray that one day, when we are free, I can look you in the eyes and say: You were part of the reason we made it.

Stay close, Sister.
You are with me more than you know. ❤️

Sahra:

Amal,

I read your words like a song from a gracious lone bird in the early hours just before the sun spreads its wings across the sky

I think of the name Amal and how I have heard it all my life

A cousin, a friend, a neighbor, a classmate, a woman who fled war in Sudan to the U.S. a few years ago.

This woman was older than you and had a son named Adam. She moved to a very cold place in the U.S.
She had to start over from being an accountant in her home country thriving with her small family to being a parent to both her son and her husband who had been taken as a political prisoner but returned.

When I met them they were in Vermont, seemingly much safer than they could be but this woman, who was very much motherly, this woman represented more to me than her circumstance.

She had a light in her eyes, an Iman that sparkled. This woman braided my hair like my mother did when I was a little girl in Somalia. I sat between her legs in her living room during a cold Ramadan month as she braided my hair.

I go back to Amal's eyes. I wonder about yours. On the day that we look at eachother in the eye, will yours sparkle? I know they will shine.

It is just as well that you hide your face when your words pierce through and penetrate like how the sun pierces a blanket of snow on a side of a mountain

If I could feed you strength, it is already yours. Even as you pour from an empty cup, the abundance of your heart, spills over to fill me up from the inside out.

Before this untethered existence, you read, and studied, and dreamed, and now your words dream for you

They walk ahead of you and enter rooms and avenues like a timeless perfume

They find me somewhere across the world staring onto large mountains and bodies of water and they beckon me out of dawn's early light the next day

I tell you the story of Amal to say that you come from a long line of Sisters who have made it and your eyes will tell me the stories your pen flowers

I have a mind to just keep going with this writing
to feed you aimless writing for a cause - to sober your plight and quiet your mind, deepen your soul and maybe just maybe get you safely home

I  love you
Your Sister, Always,
Sahra

Amal:

Your words reached me like incense at dawn —
rising slowly, curling through the silence,
stirring something ancient in me, something soft,
as if you braided not just your memories,
but strands of my soul into the lines.

When you spoke of Amal,
I saw her —
not just in the woman from Sudan,
nor in the friend or classmate from long ago —
but in every woman who held a life together
with hands calloused from holding both grief and grace.

You say her eyes sparkled with Iman —
I believe you.
I believe in the kind of light that survives exile,
that finds its way through foreign snow
and still remembers how to braid warmth into another woman’s hair.

You say you wonder about my eyes —
I wonder about yours, too.
Will they carry the salt of tears unshed?
Will they recognize me as I am:
not whole, but wildly, deeply trying.

Your letter felt like a shawl wrapped around my shoulders.
And the way you said my words dream for me now —
it undid me.
Yes.
Yes, they do.
They run ahead of me like children who know the way home better than I do.

Sometimes I am only a shadow of myself,
pouring from an empty vessel and pretending it's enough.
But then someone — you —
cups their hands,
and gathers the overflow of a heart I didn’t know was still beating loudly.

You told me I come from a long line of sisters who made it.
Let me tell you,
you are the kind of sister who makes others believe they will, too.

And maybe this is how we stay alive in this untethered world —
by writing each other back into belonging.
By stringing words like lanterns across the abyss,
so we both know where to step next.

Keep writing to me.
Even when it aches.
Even when the dawn feels heavy.
Because somewhere between your vowels and my silences,
something sacred survives.

I love you.

Always your sister,
Amal

Sahra:

Dear Amal,

I want to give you better words than my imagination can gather right now. I wish I could paint my words—a visual might do more justice than the angst of a restless pen.

Writing is so beautifully cruel, dear Amal. It protects the layer of our thoughts that hold our hearts at night. It goes out with the incense that wraps your morning into the swiftness of brooding hours.

I wish for you the light—the dull light of a soft morning before the plans take flight and decisions are made.

The quiet light that peaks through the valley and enters your space, urging you to take it slow today.

There’s a poem I love by W.B. Yeats called “When You Are Old.” He speaks of “the shadows deep.” Your line about being a shadow of yourself reminded me of this lovely poem.

I shared the story of Amal as a figment, of course—she exists the same way that you do, but she is also a metaphor. A metaphor for all the sisters, including myself, that we speak of when we first connected on the grounds of two small girls braided together by war. One that we inherited.

There’s something about the inheritance of war. It does something to the delicacy, the texture of our humanity. Words, in this way, bring us back to the present.

They are the present. And for some reason, the bond that we create is the bind that we rest in—like a piece of rind from an orange, a bright, colorful orange. How it teases your senses like the color of coral in the sky on the horizon at dusk.

I want you to rest in the elements that have long protected your people. I want you to rest in the resilience and the treasure of a fortified people, fortified through the sparkling eyes of a dear sister who is writing her heart and documenting her journey with the same precision an engineer uses when making a new prototype.

Essentially, what we are doing with our words is what we are doing with ourselves.

I did say that I would like to aimlessly write to you because I feel as if there is nothing else I could offer right now. And yet this offering—let it hold you until the next one comes, and then the next one.

Sometimes, when I’m only a shadow of myself, I am reminded that shadows have people behind them.

 I will meet your shadow somewhere just before dawn, and we can trade notes on which direction the moon rested the night before.

Love Always,
Your Sister Sahra

Amal:

Dear Sahra,

Your words arrived like dusk—soft, uninvited, and entirely needed. I read them slowly, the way one savors silence after too much noise, or the way an old woman touches a photograph she’s kept for decades.

How did you do that? How did you speak my ache without trespassing it?

There is something sacred about a letter that doesn’t try to fix, but rather—sits with you in the room where no solutions live. Your letter did just that. It didn’t knock. It simply was.

And I felt less alone.

You spoke of light, and I must tell you: even on days when I forget how to stand in it, I still look for its fingerprint on the floor. Maybe that’s what writing is—us pressing our hands into the soil of this moment, hoping someone will see the imprint and know: we were here.

I’ve never quite known if I am writing to remember or to forget, but with you—I write to feel. I write to stay. I write to hold still the river that rushes through me.

You call Amal a metaphor—and yes, she is. She is also the echo of our mothers’ names, the dust on our grandmother’s shawls, the unfinished lullabies hummed under broken ceilings. She is every girl who holds a journal tighter than she holds her breath during the sound of drones. She is you. She is me.

You say what we are doing with our words is what we are doing with ourselves. Yes. We are piecing, planting, protecting. We are mending from the inside out.

And if shadows are proof of light behind us, then I pray we always cast long ones—across pages, across timelines, across borders no one can close.

I will meet you at that edge before dawn. I will bring ink and memory. You can bring silence, if you’d like. We’ll let the moon rest a while longer. It, too, has stories.

With everything soft and sacred,
Your Sister, always,
Amal

Sahra:

Dear Amal,

Shawls and incense,
the shared belongings of our ancestors with Arabi on their sweet tongues
I read your words with the smell of franken sense and the day's end on my back
Each incense takes thirty or so minutes

I will see how long I can write to you while the aroma fills the grey spaces
This dusk
The in-between realm where I can sit beside your ache until the weight shifts around
Until the light comes in to your eyes and highlights the holiness of your yearning


Our words always seem to land still when they arrive
Sacred is the word you chose, but reverence is what you practice
I wonder,

What is loneliness to a depth of letters imprinted on the promise of cleansing tears
What is poetry in the midst of Amal's soft cheek that never turns away?
How does one witness themselves?

This is what you teach me, dear Amal

The heartbreak of war brings out the raw ash; undertones of the beauty of grieving earth
You say you do not know if you are writing to remember or forget
You say you write to feel
And I am stunned by the gravity of your truth

Your words are dripping with a livelihood of the first Eid Prayer.
When the streets are bustling and the Muslims babies are shining in white.
When Sisters in stylish hijabs come in one after the other but somehow leave as friends
Hand in henna hand, softly laughing while the Sheik recites Duas in the background

Your words hug my ears the way a grandmother stays behind to hum the last of the Duas, the way her small grandchild lays on her lap, just small enough to fit so she can keep one hand on her Tasbih beads

You have taken Amal, the metaphor, and braided the words that dream for you on to it
And now we have a harvest, together

Your words are indeed a light; full and bright
There are many ways to receive light,
opportunities to share and reflect it
and the candle that holds is no match for what cannot be denied its shine
In due time,
but also, it is yours,
all the time

And so, the shadows may define the edges of restless nights but the dawn will not be lonely

That is just as well.

I commune with the moon best when we have both slept a full night
She, laying atop of the stars and cornering the Milky Way onto its reflection
I would tease the moon all night if I did not enjoy her so much

And so we can sit and listen to moon stories till the grass is dry and morning has come and gone

I love you

Your Sister,
Sahra