The “after”

*NOTE: Why am I posting my journal entries? See my inaugural post: Beyond journalism

(*artwork: “Yet I dance”)

I scoured for a journal entry written on October 7th, 2023. It did not exist.

I remember, on October 7th, 2023, that I was about to miss my bus. I ran out the door with shoes untied, whipping a scarf around my neck, almost forgetting to lock the door, the key’s cold teeth digging into my palm. Checking if I had my phone, seeing the flash of a red BBC notification - Hamas, rockets, Israel. I remember thinking, dimly, like a quick surplus of air in my lungs, like a distant awareness stirring from a slumber, “I hope everything will be okay”. I caught my bus.

I had been in London for less than a month. I had written in my journal “all my dreams have come true”. I had started my PhD, met my supervisor, met my lab, explored the campus that sprawled with old castle-like stone buildings and new ones sleek like glass. I had not yet discovered the forests. I had heard and had conversations about neuroscience that rang like firecrackers in my head, peeling me open to new life, creativity, rigour. I was reading books, drawing with ink, daydreaming. I was excited. I know, now, that this excitement, this tunnel vision and hyper focus that I romanticized, was not innocent. Did I think of whose blood I danced on? No. I thought about coding and slept soundly. I thought about my state of flow and the sun in my hair. 

***

My morning was full of fear. I woke up from an intense dream about being kicked out of my PhD program. I then woke up to a headline that said a child in Lebanon has been killed each day this month. Then I stumble to the bathroom and nearly throw up in my sink. 

Another notification says that there is a protest for Palestine and Lebanon on campus. This time, I feel the pull to rally. But I know, too, that I am too sick to go, or will get too sick, and it will take me the weekend to recover; this toll outweighs anything my presence can do there. Instead, I write and plan articles. There is no shortage of articles to write and plan and write. 

***

Walking to natural science, two young Arab men hold each other in the chemistry building, bawling. I wanted to run to them. Around them, people avert their eyes and stare at their phones. I know this kind of pain; I know what this is about. How could I walk past this? But the rush of people is fast and city-like, and I’m pushed by random bodies and noise into the lunch line in front of me. Here, people are ordered; they talk about midterms and fast food. My keffiyeh is around my shoulders. After buying lunch, I circled back to the chemistry building to find the two crying men. They were gone. 

***

I took a powdery Claritin. Now I’m in my bathroom: my fluorescent lights and I, the cold bathroom tiles. My face is puffed, my eyes swollen. Will this subside? Will I be able to line my eyes? My hair is wet and braided from last night: I’d taken the warmest, longest shower and the fumes of my hair products reminded me of the encampments. 

Gaza, Gaza, don’t you cry. 

I remember rallying in the night - 11pm, 1am, the flags ghostly in the streets. 

I remember crying beneath the northern lights with X’s dog licking away my tears. The next day, I was teaching tatreez in a tent. Red thread, Aida cloth, rain. I did a lot of laughing and I felt safe. 

I want these flashbacks to die. But my house is a living fossil that  knows no mercy. I tore through my past journal entries and realized how much I’ve done in a year and how I distinctly felt that all I did was rot.

 How can I write about encampments erected in response to genocide?  How can I give it a narrative other than living through it? 

I was there; I was documenting; I was breathing that manic air. Is that enough? Nothing is enough. 

That lawn will always be haunted. I will never go back there. I will perch on its edge and try to blink away its emptiness. 

I remember the walk with Y through Western at night, to the bus stop, where I told her everything, where we shone ghostly in its fluorescent light like the flags. 

I think about how, fundamentally, the encampments, the state of them as I felt them, don’t feel real: I know they marked me, but the trajectory is blurred and cracked. 

I return there in my head and I feel dread. I push it all away. The parts I let in are broken, like my claim to them has leaked away, that remembering is wrong and irrelevant. And yet, my articles document everything. I can’t forget this temporary society and the way it was filled with dreams. I was full of idealism and hope. I was impatient with idealism and hope. I was impatient about everything, suddenly, all the time. I carried it quietly, perhaps unknowingly. I was trying to balance research and coding and brain scans and marking math assignments - a split screen that split my head. 

I remember the fear I felt - what will I become now? - when Z texted “the encampments are dismantling. Come say goodbye”. I was bleary-eyed, had just woken up. 

So it’s all over? 

Can I shed the encampments from memory? Can I burn it, close it, sacrifice it? I want it to be history and never remembrance, fact and never feeling. The harm that is vesselled there - the thoroughness of it - cannot be undone or exceeded. I know I could live there for years in my head, running in my quiet, fiery, stagnant, isolating circles - what do I write? How do I write it? When do I write it? Who do I talk to? How much time do I have? Am I doing this history justice, history that I’m living through and trying to preserve? Did I only write five articles about the encampments? How many people did I teach tatreez to? Was I stagnant? What is the right thing to do when a genocide unfolds live on my phone-addicted eyes and my generation is in tents with whiteboards listing our university’s complicity in international war crimes? How do I re-become the neuroscience PhD student that I am on paper, that forms my only real claim to this university? 

I remember the article I planned that I never wrote, that I wrote in my head like a lifeline. It was called The last seven days of Western University’s encampments. It had felt right, essential, a closure, a complement to my first encampment article - The first seven days of Western University’s encampments - published on May 15th.

I didn’t write it. I left Instagram, cried for days, ran Socratic circles about liberation and by some miracle slogged through research and kept my academic promises until I took a bus home to Fredericton. Everytime my parents called, I said the same thing: “I can’t wait to come home”. 

It doesn’t matter how much I wring my hands. It doesn’t matter how much I sob - silently or unsilently. It is time, now, to purge myself of that dismantled village.

***

It is mid afternoon and my flow is returning. It is returning because of the urgency, the raw urgency of this time; the sense that the ground I walk on and the air I breathe is bursting at the seams and so I cannot be wasteful. It is all anarchic. It is all dystopian. I too, am pre-dead; I am next in line, somewhere, on the path to total genocide. This pavement, these woods, this building, these offices and desks, the order they bestow, their promise of a life trajectory - its premises are fracturing. The cracks widen. Rage, grief, desperation, the urgency to be witnessed, chronic and gaslit pain - it all erupts from the cracks. It erupted when a Lebanese girl fell into my arms because I was wearing a keffiyeh. It erupted when a girl in the elevator said “thank you for wearing this, I’m Palestinian”. It erupts when anyone wearing a keffiyeh in my building holds my gaze for a second longer than custom. It erupts when people’s whose names I don’t know will protect me because we’re on the same side of history. This university is a miniature form of global politics; it is the child, the grandchild, the protege, its own collectible snowglobe of the power imbalance encrusted in the world order. The world order is breaking and it threatens the very existence of this university. It threatens schedules and their domination of time; it threatens administration, their God-like declaration of institutional policies and laws; it threatens what a degree is and what it promises; it threatens every single person’s claim to meaning on this campus. The breakage that comes with the breaking of this world order, that unwinds in its students and faculty, is not staying latent. We look at each other, keffiyeh-clad as we go through the rituals of this building, thinking “when is it all going to end, once and for all? We’re here and we’re waiting.” We already believe in something “After”. We’re waiting for the puppet show to end. Outside, with my tea and samosas, the wind picks up and the dead leaves sway. ♦