photo #9260451

People often think a home is made of walls. It isn’t. A home is the place where a person finally stops feeling like a stranger in the world. It is where a father can finally say to himself, “I made it.” In Gaza, many men spend half their lives chasing a single dream. Not wealth. Not luxury. A home. They work impossible hours, save every penny they can, borrow from banks, and spend years repaying debts that consume much of their income. Not because they dream of a beautiful building, but because they want to give their wives a place that feels safe, their children a room they can call their own, and their families a future with an address. My aunt still has four years left on her mortgage. Every month, she continues making payments on a house that no longer exists. The war destroyed it. The debt survived. Sometimes I wonder what those payments are really for. Is she paying for concrete? Or for the memory of a kitchen where her children once laughed? For windows that will never open again? For a life that ended before the mortgage did? That is why people misunderstand what happened to Gaza. They think we lost our houses. We didn’t. We lost the geography of our memories. The places where birthdays were celebrated. Where mothers waited by the window. Where fathers came home exhausted from work and, for a brief moment, felt that all their sacrifices had been worthwhile. Today, hundreds of thousands of us live in tents. People call them “shelters.” But a tent can protect you from neither the weather nor grief. It cannot become a home. It cannot hold a lifetime. Since our homes were destroyed, I have often felt as though we are living in a long exile without ever crossing a border. We are still in our own city. Still speaking the same language. Still walking the same streets. Yet everything that once whispered, “You belong here,” has disappeared. Perhaps that is why losing a home hurts differently from losing almost anything else. Because when a house collapses, it is not the walls that fall. It is a father’s years of sacrifice. A mother’s sense of safety. A child’s earliest memories. A family’s future. And there are ruins that no architect can ever rebuild.