The weight of distance by Zayan Idriss

My younger brother has always been my shadow, both my biggest burden and my biggest blessing. We shared every toy and childhood memory until the 2020 port blast carved him into someone else. I watched him retreat into a shell of PTSD and anxiety, a twelve-year-old who couldn't sleep alone or let our parents out of his sight. While my brother found his footing again, the world shifted once more. 

To be frank, I find it difficult to be here while Lebanon is falling apart. 

There is a hollow, sickening parallel in my brother’s and my life right now. I wake up to the quiet peace of Utrecht, checking my phone before I even check my pulse, while he wakes up to the sound of war. I am here, pursuing a degree and a future, while he is back home, forced to survive a trauma he only just began to heal from. 

It is a specific kind of torture to study for exams in a library while my best friend is halfway across the world, waiting for the next strike. People ask me how my studies are going, but the honest truth is that I am barely even here. My body is in a lecture hall in the Netherlands, but my heart is in Lebanon, crouching in the dark with my brother. 

I find myself constantly angry at everyone around me. Why are they not constantly worrying about their homes getting bombed like I am? or feel the need to pick up the phone and call the people they love to make sure they're alive? Why is it that every time I go out with my friends or get to enjoy myself on a night out, there's a guilt inside of me eating me alive because my mom and dad are stuck in a war we never know the end of? 

And the silly thing is that I have it so so so good. 

I am lucky enough to have grown up in safety, with parents who have the resources to protect themselves. I am lucky enough to afford an education, to have moved abroad, and to have access to opportunities that others can only dream of. 

But that luck feels like such a heavy weight. 

I carry the weight of my best friend who cries herself to sleep, terrified of dying. I carry the weight of my mother’s constant anxiety. I carry the weight of the 11-year-old girl who got killed in the car yesterday. I carry the weight of the student who never finished his first year at uni. I carry the weight of the other thousands dead. I carry the weight of the millions forcibly displaced. 

I don't want you to pity me. I want you to understand the sheer scale of the suffering my people have had to face every single day and yet they still continue to find ways to push through. And to be frank, this sort of resistance is the only thing that keeps me moving at all.