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 dearest places to

me—above all, al-Baaqa cafe, at the port of Gaza, which sits squarely on a throne at the

center of my heart.

But my heart took me there. 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 will never arrive.

When I sat down, the hard wood of the chair beneath me cried out, as though refusing their

absence.

A young waiter approached me. His face was completely alien to the place; 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 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 was 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: 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 tables that had no idea that

this place was both a cafe and a graveyard. When my fingers reached out to touch the surface

of the table, they didn’t feel wood—they 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 was planning a new issue of Magazine 28. It wasn’t the

Mahmoud that I knew was 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 Gallery 28 in Rafah into a heart pulsing with art.I looked at him; he was contemplating the empty cup of coffee. “Father of Malak!” he said,

his voice like the rustle of the magazine’s pages that we smelled as they 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, 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 beat us to the press, to the theater,

to language, to music.

“Ismail was with us that night,” Mahmoud’s voice was soft. “He was taking photos of 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. In 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 coffee 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 shirt he was in 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 your poems about the legs of beautiful women?”

I saw him taking some old slips of paper out of his pocket. It was an unfinished manuscript: a

poem about Surita, his Tunisian inamorata. He was dreaming of summing her all up in a

single poem, a poem that only the two of us would see, 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 that day when there was a power cut in the office and we were laughing 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 was documenting the moment we grew up, before time smashed it into

smithereens.Ahmad saw Gaza as one body, one body in pain as it was 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,

to find 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, leaving behind a small stain on the table, a stain resembling a 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 Gaza 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 seventeen, was still betting/wagering 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 was 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 that we never

made: a film that doesn’t need car chases, vehicles blowing up, bullets, and 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, I saw Omar taking a broken clapperboard out of his coat and place it on the

table instead of the coffee cup. We weren’t in the cafe; 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 card 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: about 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, could hear the sound of 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 those migrants: 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 that was quicker than his heartbeats, was standing there,

behind his beloved friend and creative partner Ismail, carrying his camera as though it was 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 in Omar al-Mukhtar

Street, then laughing as though they had realized that the light they were chasing was a light

that was always escaping us.