For long enough.

 I woke up today thinking about a lot of things, reading a lot of things, and watching a lot of things. Palestine, the protest, the people, the detentions, the anger, the frustration, everything around. And that's when I read Darwish. 

A reporter asked him, "Is there any hope for this nation?" and Darwish said, "Even if there is no hope, we are obliged to invent and create hope. Without hope, we are lost."

Which naturally made me think: how did we get here? 

It’s easier to lose hope during times like these, when you see fault in everything, and no one is bothered about anything. Capitalism is everywhere, and the true revolution? What does that even mean? I feel Marx smirking in his grave. Children are losing their childhood, women are being raped, queer and dalit people are being killed, men have lost their minds, the forests are being destroyed, and water is becoming the food for machines, and the list feels endless, and you can feel it in your body: the anger, anxiety, the helplessness. There is a collective hate that boils in the blood, like the burns from the heat. There is chaos everywhere, and you look around and naturally feel hopeless. 

As Darwish says, “Without hope, we are lost.” But then, what if we are lost? 

That’s when you look around again. 

It might sometimes be the random girl who came up to me today and talked to me about my watermelon earrings, or maybe seeing the Palestine solidarity calendar on my table, or the people, young and old, protesting on the streets, or those who make songs, art, write, read, create, and discuss, or those who come forward in time to simply support, or like the many journalists who do ground reporting from the ground and not the air-conditioned rooms, or the comrades screaming their lungs out and resisting, or the colleague who listens and questions, or the grandmothers siting together with their cup of tea and asking, why are they still in jail, or the self, who sits in the middle of the work and reads A Lover From Palestine. 

We are all creating. In however many ways possible, because that’s the only way. 

What if we are lost? 

We will find our way back. 

But for how long? 

For long enough. 

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