Becoming found in a story

We are all we have, she says quietly, too quietly, in a session where the calamity of genocide coexists with the wordless closeting pressed on her by heteroreligous family.  

Please, people, can’t we just stay together, says a community organizer in the wake of SWANA community lateral violence and grief. 

How do I find a world to belong in when my parents are gone and they are the only ones to claim me, says a first-generation brown multimigrant missing homeland with every heartbeat, every mouthful of food, every step to and from work, every alone moment in her new house earned after decades of keeping her head down in white work spaces. 

I reread the first few lines: I have written ‘quiet’ eight times. I edit. I wonder why that word, when speaking of storying. Is it that our stories have had to be quiet? Or that we say them quietly, only to ourselves and our therapists? Is it that quiet allows us to hear ourselves? Is it that the stories that matter for the next generation have yet to be said out loud? 

“Why do I behave as if January doesn’t exist and try to finish everything in December every year?” I giggle. I’m doing the exact same thing. There are four of us, Arab women with Palestinian roots. One with family still there, one with paperwork, one with paperwork lost or taken, one with no legitimate ties other than matrilineal stories that were only shared after October 7. There is way too much food: Lebanese wine, Ethiopian take out, homemade bread with Palestinian thyme brought back illegally in a suitcase, lentil soup. There is a full chicken and rice dish halfway made in the kitchen, abandoned in favour of hanging up new curtains. I met these women exactly a year ago at an end-of-year dinner composed by word of mouth in the face of repression and discrimination within academic institutions. I wish it hadn’t taken a genocide to find them. We have only spent time together a handful of times this past year, mostly at community events and in support of each other's initiatives. 

We are talking over each other, in and out of the kitchen as if it was our own, as if it was back home in the village, as if I’ve known them my whole life. The ease is almost painful. It makes me realize how much time I spend outside of my body now. We are telling stories. Hard stories. Lived stories, not news or gossip. Births without healthcare. Discrimination and lawsuits. Evacuations during war. Delayed motherhood in the wake of dispossession and insecurity. We are laughing so hard, so incredibly hard. Dark humor is funny. Moments of unexpected drama during everyday horrors are funny. Slippages of meaning in second and third and native languages are hilarious. The audacity of ridiculous allegations and violence that are so commonplace they are predictable, can be so funny. The wishes of our mothers, shaping who we each are with definitive force, so funny now that we too are mothers. Even if we can only laugh three weeks later, three months later, three years later, thirty years from now. We are laughing so hard.  

It’s a story about 2006. The summer war. The 33-day war. حرب تموز. The war that meant I didn’t move back to Lebanon. The woman sitting in the la-z-boy finishes telling the story, and we are just whooping with laughter at the ending. The pressure release. In the laughter she concludes with reactions from the 'international’ folks in the story that left her unsettled in a way that the war parts of the story did not. We keep laughing at the punchline.  

Then we breathe. And pause for the story to sit in our bones. To welcome it home in each of us. A pause to include all that was not said. A pause to take note of the foreigners’ words of disdain, then and now. The woman sitting right in front of me on the edge of the couch pulls out her tatreez. She almost whispers: 

“My mother was on the last plane out of the airport before it got bombed that summer” 

The one in the la-z-boy looks straight at her, no laughter: “My father arrived at the airport two hours before the bombing to join us.” 

It is so quiet inside me. I say: “My mother’s plane left an hour before the bombing.” [My father was contracted to redo all the signage when the airport was repaired after, to concretely show the way through in the aftermath where he almost lost his wife].  

There is a sacred silence, honored by the fourth carefully gazing in turn at each of us, a solemn witnessing with no words. Everything beyond this circle fades away completely as we swirl in together towards being found. Everyone was either coming or going that summer. Is it a choice to know which is better: to watch and name from a distance, or be right in it, wordless and full of it all. 

We are all we have, please let us all stay together, let us claim each other.  

December 15/18, 2025 

With gratitude to Sara Abdo for naming the sacred dimension.