This spoken word piece is based on a LinkedIn post by Ms. Azhaar Amayreh, Global Marketing Manager, Digital Marketer, English-Arabic Interpreter, Translator, and Bilingual Content-marketing (freelancer).

Please consider donating to Azhaar’s GoFundMe campaign: Stuck in Gaza, with child, family/elderly, frail dependents for the past 22 months.

Peace, MAA

The truth being, I’ve already died, have been killed, butchered so many times, repeatedly. The imagination seems to have gone totally wild – each imagined near-death occurrence, visualized episode gets to be more brutal, more bloody, more despicable than the previous one.

But it must be noted, emphasized, shared, one has to put it bluntly that I’ve endured these deaths or near-death experiences many times over here in Gaza.

Even seemingly so natural, blissful sleep, magical sleep, beautiful sleep, evades me. It cruelly, mercilessly drags my soul deeper and deeper into that scary bottomless pit of more and more haunting images, and bloodied visuals of shackled hands, shattered, bruised, and penetrated human torsos, and those horrors of war simply refuse to fade away into oblivion.

Dark clouds, dark skies of hell, and sky-high anxiety seem to stare down at me with every passing minute of the hour, waking me, jolting me up from my nightmarish, trance-like state. Not allowing me, making me long for a blissful eternal and peaceful sleep, if that means attaining that so cursory a wish within step-motherly death, if now simply not achievable in life.

The visuals of those tortured and killed souls, half-alive buried people under the rubble, their screams, their cries, those sounds and scenes are now permanently etched deep in my living mind, or whatever is left of my deeply impacted senses by all this bloodshed witnessed 24/7 over the past 21 months.

I’ve seen too much of horror, heard too many human cries pleading for help whom I could not attend to, heard too many vivid accounts of the final moments, of those whom I knew in person, the torture, the savagery of war they had to endure right to their very end, their last breath.

Those horrifying images, those despicable scenes unfolding right inside my own head, over and over again, but getting worse, darker, more hellish, and more prolonged.

A never-ending horror movie, but for real, and you find yourself right in the center of it, unable to escape, to jump out, to walk away from.

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