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The first time I read Mornings in Jenin by Susan Abulhawa, it shattered me. I sat there, drowning in its grief, in its merciless unraveling of history, thinking—how can a book be this devastating? I had already started reaching for tragic stories back then, testing the weight of sorrow like one tests the sharpness of a blade. But now, I’ve picked it up again—not for the ache, not for the sadness, but because I felt that if I could do nothing else for Palestine, the least I could do was feel. To connect. To understand.

But I couldn’t connect. And that disgusted me.

Because this isn’t history. This isn’t fiction. This isn’t pain neatly confined between pages. This is reality. This is now. And yet, here I am, flipping through a book while children are being turned into unrecognizable chunks of flesh. While parents dig through rubble with their bare hands, hoping to find pieces of the people they loved. While the world watches, calculates casualties like statistics, then scrolls past.

I think of Amal, torn from her family before she even knew what it meant to belong. I think of her brother, Yousef, whose hands were trained to hold a rifle instead of the books he once dreamed of reading. I think of the bullet that found her son’s head before life even had the chance to. Mornings in Jenin is not just a story. It is generations of exile, of love turned into mourning, of bodies piling upon bodies until there is no space left for the living.

My heart bleeds for them, but more than that, my heart bleeds for us.

For whatever scraps of humanity we had left—they seeped through the earth long before October 7, 2023.

We lost them when we stopped seeing Palestinian children as children. When we started labeling resistance as terrorism and genocide as self-defense. When we let Bloodthirsty Israeli murderers and their puppet world leaders rewrite history, twist the facts, justify murder after murder until the world became numb to blood.

And then, A Thousand Splendid Suns. I remember a friend once told me she hated sad endings. That she preferred stories where things turn out okay. And I shook my head at the privilege in that. Because we—those of us safe in our homes, scrolling through tragedy as if it’s entertainment—we get to choose.

Palestinians don’t.

I think of Mariam, whose life had been nothing but survival, whose hands bled from scrubbing floors in a house where love was as scarce as freedom. I think of Laila, watching Kabul crumble before her eyes, knowing that the only escape from oppression was in the hands of another oppressor. They, too, lived war, breathed war, lost their childhoods to it.

But even their stories ended with some semblance of peace. Palestine doesn’t get that ending.

They don’t get the luxury of closing the book, of turning away, of pretending it’s just another war. They wake up in bombed-out ruins. They sleep in graves they dug themselves. They are slaughtered in hospitals, in schools, in mosques. And the world does nothing.

I read about the horrors in Mornings in Jenin, and every massacre, every murder, every moment of despair—it has a face. The children wrapped in white. The mothers wailing at lifeless bodies. The fathers carrying pieces of their sons.

I have seen these faces on my screen since 2023. And now, in 2025, I still see them.

And I cannot, will not, understand how the world carries on.

But this…this is just a vent. And even that feels cowardly.

To write, to grieve, to pour my frustration onto a page as if that does anything, as if it absolves me of the guilt that comes with merely watching. As if mourning from a distance is enough.

Because the Palestinians don’t get to offload their grief into words and call it a day. They don’t get to step away for the sake of sanity, to forget for the sake of survival. They carry their pain in their bones, in the rubble of their homes, in the names of the dead etched into their brave tongues.

They refuse to erase their memories, their history, their identity, no matter how much the world begs them to.

And here I am, exhausted by the mere awareness of it. But what can I do? I'm just one of the infinite heartless humans on earth, just like you .