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