Every time I visit my city, Gaza, I’m filled with yearning. Yearning that appears before me as rubble and dust, mountains of wreckage as far as the eye can see. I’m haunted by the voices and souls of all the friends who have been snatched away by absence.

The first time I went to the seafront during the genocide, I tried to avoid the places dearest to me—above all, al-Baaqa cafe, at the port of Gaza, which sits squarely on a throne at the center of my heart.

My heart took me there anyway. Al-Baaqa was clothed, as usual, in salt and noise, but something was missing in the air, like a severed string in an old guitar. I headed to my table, to that corner that had witnessed the birth of our life and its death, and found it completely deserted, waiting for someone who would never arrive.

When I sat down, the hardwood of the chair beneath me cried out, as though refusing the absence of my friends.

A young waiter approached me. His face looked alien in this place, he was a total stranger; he didn’t know me, didn’t know the rituals of this table. I looked at him coldly and ordered two black coffees, no sugar, indicating the second was for the seat in front of me. It was empty, but heavy with the presence of Ismail Abu Hatab.

Suddenly, time fell apart. I returned to that moment: The moment that I will keep running away from and coming back to. The explosion was not a sound; it was a white light tearing through reality. I saw Ismail, with his unwavering calm. He was adjusting the lens of his camera when the place was plunged into darkness. In that insane moment, I tried to reach my hand into the story, to that second just before his departure; I tried to scream, to pull at his shirt, to beg him not to come to al-Baaqa that night. My hands were waving in the air, trying to extricate his body from the claws of death, but my fingers were passing through his soul as though it were vapor. I failed. I couldn’t stop the hands of time from decimating the best and most beautiful of us.

As the crushing dejection set in, the presence began to dissolve. The emptiness around me became nothing, just a place for strangers. Suddenly, my yearning broke through the laws of physics, and the table began to fill up. They didn’t come as ghosts; they came to claim their final places.

I sat there, waiting. The waiter was still far away, going around the tables, with no idea that this place was both a cafe and a graveyard. When my fingers reached out to touch the surface of the table, I didn’t feel wood—I felt the cold walls of the historic al-Ghussein House.

I suddenly found Mahmoud Alshaer sitting opposite me. He was wearing his usual shirt, his hands waving in the air as though he were planning a new issue of 28 Magazine. It wasn’t the Mahmoud that I know is currently in Paris; it was the Mahmoud of 2015: the one who never slept, who transformed the halls, theaters, and institutions of Gaza into planets of laughter and joy, who turned 28 Gallery in Rafah into a heart pulsing with art.

I looked at him; he was contemplating the empty cup of coffee. “Abu Malak!” He said it in a voice that recalled the rustling of our magazine’s pages, the smell we inhaled as it came off the press. “Do you remember that night in al-Mishaal Theater? When all the equipment broke down and we were about to lose it, but then we decided to sing, and everyone sang along with us?”

I didn’t respond. In his eyes, I saw the look that came just before brokenness: the look he had as he watched our miracles being decimated, one after the other, by the war.

Mahmoud wasn’t talking about art; he was talking about the dejection that followed all these accomplishments. He was fidgeting, his fingers stained with an ink nobody could see—the ink of all the stories we couldn’t write because the war had beaten us to the press, to the theater, to language, to music.

“Ismail was with us that night,” Mahmoud’s voice was soft. “He was filming us as we made the impossible happen.” He went quiet, and I looked at the empty chair next to his, where Ismail should’ve been. At that moment, my table at al-Baaqa cafe turned into our old office in Mushtaha Tower. The smell of the sea turned into the smell of paper and cheap nescafe; and Mahmoud morphed from a faraway friend to a soul that reproaches me because I’m still trying to write, whereas he’s still trapped in that last, incomplete, never-published headline.

Mahmoud didn’t leave. He was just trying to erase the ink from his fingers, waiting for us to be here, all together again—complete, as we once were—to start telling a story that will never end.

The waiter came at last. He put the coffees down in front of the outermost chair, and left me to the sound of the sea, which now became a throat that howled with Ahmad’s name. Without summoning him, I found Ahmad Jarada sitting there, in a corner of al-Baaqa that the sun never reaches. He was wearing the same shirt as the first time I saw him in 2008, a shirt that smelled like al-Shaja‘iya’s narrow alleyways: the smell of fresh hope before it became contaminated by the blood of strangers. He looked at me and didn’t say hello. He said, in a voice dripping with a noble sadness, “Are you still smoking until your lungs burn, while writing poems about the legs of beautiful women?”

He took some old slips of paper out of his pocket. It was an unfinished manuscript: a poem about Surita, his Tunisian inamorata. He dreamt of summing her all up in a single poem, a poem that only the two of us would read, because I was writing it with him. He said, staring at the coffee cup, “Do you remember Fathi al-Jumla, who once had a dream about us gathered at the Sanfour Intersection in Gaza, dying one by one?”

I couldn’t answer him. The lump in my throat was heavier than death. In that moment, the cafe was transformed into a battlefield of war and love. We weren’t talking about politics; we were talking about the little things: the color of the walls in our old home; the taste of the tea on the day there was a power cut in the office and we laughed until we were close to tears; the silence of Ismail Abu Hatab as he gazed at us from behind his camera lens, as though he were documenting the moment we grew up, before time smashed his camera into smithereens.

Ahmad saw Gaza as one body, one body in pain, on its way out of history. “Ismail is going to set up better lighting for us somewhere else,” Ahmad was saying as he ran his fingers along the table, which was missing his paintbrush.

In that moment, Ahmad became all the friends who had left the keys of their homes behind, finding themselves opening doors in the farthest reaches of the earth. Ahmad has never left; Ahmad is the bogeyman who feeds my memory, who makes me realize that when we lost Ismail, we lost part of the compass that guides us towards love and joy.

Ahmad left behind a small stain on the table, one resembling the map of Gaza. A map that doesn’t change, no matter how hard they try to erase it from his skin.

I sensed a coldness in the air, a coldness that doesn’t come from the Gazan sea breeze, but from Istanbul, which lives in the pockets of Omar Elemawi. The prodigy, as we called him, was sitting in his seat at this table, on my right, his legs crossed, one hand holding a Royal 01 cigarette and the other searching for the perfect camera angle.

Omar, who directed Chaos the first feature-length action film in the history of Gazan cinema, at the age of 17, was still betting on the fact that the world was big enough for the madness of a boy from Jabaliya. Now he looked quieter, as though the cinema that had brought him out of our streets and to the screens of the world had drained him of the clamor of his youth, and left him with the sadness of great directors.

“Abu Malak, listen,” he said, seriously, the way he always said it to me, gazing at the table as though it were a film set abandoned by life. “Is the camera still afraid of reality?”

He was waiting for my response. He started telling me about that film of ours we never made: a film that doesn’t need car chases, vehicles blowing up, bullets, or bombs, or soldiers dying and coming back to life, the screaming of children or howling of women; a film composed of one long silence. He told me about a scene that Ismail had insisted on filming in al-Baaqa: a scene in which Gaza’s sea appears, swallowing words instead of waves.

“Ismail knew something we didn’t know,” said Omar, a surreal gleam in his eyes. “He knew that we in Gaza don’t shoot films, we shoot ghosts that roam around the streets before they depart.”

In that moment, Omar took a broken clapperboard out of his coat and placed it on the table instead of the coffee cup. We weren’t in the café anymore; we were at the studio of impossible memories. I saw in him that boy who had grown up too soon; the boy who had taught us that life could be summed up in a single snapshot; a snapshot in which we were together, under a sun that did not kill us with its clarity.

Omar, who had directed the impossible, could not find a direction out of this absence. He was sitting there, trying to find the right moment to shout “cut” in this scene in which we had gathered around the soul of Ibrahim. When I asked him about the film, he responded, vanishing slowly in a cloud of cigarette smoke: “The film is finished, Raed. We’re in the editing stage now. We’re cutting up our days, stitching together our memories, trying to stick all this absence in as filler material.”

Omar disappeared, leaving behind an emptiness like a cinema screen that had suddenly gone blank. He left me alone with my table, my coffee that had gone cold, and with Ismail who was watching all this—watching us trying to pull our memories out from beneath the rubble.

As Omar’s cigarette smoke began to dissipate, the table began to shake. It wasn’t the waves, but a laugh that I knew well, a laugh that was capable of making death seem like a bad joke that wasn’t worth believing.

A cinematic entrance on the red carpet. Ahmad Baalousha—with a suit that looked like his smile, stylish and enchanting, and a heart that was still trapped in Karawan cafe—had come to topple the table over my head.

“Still playing tricks, Raed? Or did the war teach you to man up and not die if you’re shot? Hah!” That was Ahmad: nothing about him had changed. He still had that spirit that made our long nights together at Karawan Cafe an epic stream of jokes. 

I saw him tossing a King of Hearts on the table, as though throwing down a piece of our lives that we didn’t know we would someday need to survive the absence. He was talking about his many travels: to Doha, Europe, Egypt, the world, about the success that chased him like his own shadow—but his voice trembled whenever the word Gaza passed over his lips. In his eyes, I saw Bayt Lahia: he carried it everywhere he went, had never left it, no matter how far he traveled.

“Som‘a,” he said, turning to the empty chair next to him, referring to Ismail by his nickname. “He fell before he had time to even listen to a joke.”

Ahmad was the friend who always had our backs, who would always patch up our brokenness with laughs. In that moment, the cafe was transformed into a long night at Karawan Cafe. I could smell the cigarette smoke, hear the cards hitting the table and the voice of Abu Hussam Barri as he prepared the tea and shisha. I felt the warmth of friendship that can never go cold.

When Ahmad departed, he didn’t leave emptiness behind. He left behind the echo of a surreal laugh, a laugh that made the sea go quiet for a moment, that made Ismail smile in my mind, as though he was saying: “As long as we can still laugh, we’re still alive.”

A reverent silence descended. This time, the table didn’t need one of the people who have left Gaza: a bullet had pierced a hole in the air through which Muath Zamlat entered. My friend, the martyr, who saw the world with an eye quicker than his heartbeats, was standing there, behind his beloved friend and creative partner Ismail, carrying his camera as though it were a light-filled embrace. I gazed at them: Ismail, with his calm gravitas, and Muath with that playful glint in his eyes.

I wasn’t recalling the moment that Ismail was martyred now; I was recalling their souls as they discussed the lighting in a scene. I saw them arguing about a corner on Omar al-Mukhtar Street, then laughing as they realized the light they were chasing was the one always escaping us. 

Muath calls out from afar, as he opens his chest to the sea and wind, to the seagulls and waves, to life itself: “Abu Malak, I told you cinema is the only way to escape! And here we are, we’ve escaped. We’re not afraid of the bombing anymore, and the camera battery never runs out, and we can film anywhere, anytime.”

Ismail was silent the whole time. He touched Muath’s shoulder. The table turned into the eternal editing room. I felt a cold rippling through the space, a cold befitting a meeting that didn’t need words.

I sit between them, sensing the weight of their cameras on the table. I was no longer preoccupied with the idea of saving them. I realized that heroism doesn’t mean they will remain here, but that I must carry their image and all the sounds and clamor of those days in which we were all together in the same frame.

“Don’t cry.” Ismail said it without opening his mouth, as Muath gazed at the sea, adjusting the focus to a sunset moment that never ends. My bitter coffee turned into a vow. The cafe was no longer narrowed by their absence. It had expanded, making the entire world their film. I bade them farewell with a last touch to the edge of the table, like one saying goodbye to a director and cinematographer who had just finished filming the most important scene of their lives, leaving me with the task of being the final viewer. 

The sea that was before me disappeared. The people in the cafe dissolved. I was left with my table and with Gaza: no longer a city, now a colossal archive that holds our dreams—dreams that will never die, even when they’re beneath the earth.