I was supposed to graduate in 2023. I loved my university so deeply, with the scent of the library, the shade of the ancient trees, the echo of footsteps in the hallways that I chose to linger. I deliberately postponed my final seven credits, not out of laziness, but out of a deep desire to remain a student a little longer.
Then the world turned upside down.
Before the genocide, books were not just objects to me; they were my constant companions. I carried them everywhere: to cafés, family gatherings, and even noisy parties. My relatives would laugh, teasing the girl who always had a thick spine of a novel peeking out of her bag. But I didn’t mind. I felt most comfortable when I carried them in my hand, as I carried their wisdom in my heart. They were my sanctuary, my secret escape from the mundane.
On October 8, 2023, we evacuated. We didn’t leave because our neighborhood was warned, but because duty called us to my aunt’s side. Her son had been martyred on October 7, and we went to offer solace, believing we would return home within a day or two.
Because of that belief, I did not say goodbye to my room. I did not run my fingers along the spines of my books one last time. I did not farewell the walls that had witnessed my late-night study sessions and my smallest victories.
I walked away from my life without looking back.
In the chaos of packing an emergency bag, I faced a choice that still burns my heart. I had placed my most precious books inside, ready to carry them into the unknown. But then a wave of cold logic hit me. I looked at the small bag and the uncertain future. I took the books out one by one and replaced them with extra layers of clothing.
Two days later, the news came like a dagger through the chest: “Your room has been completely destroyed in an airstrike, Rawan.”
The realization didn’t hit me all at once. I didn’t cry for my clothes, my jewelry, or the laptop that held my assignments. My only plea to my brothers was a desperate: “Can you go back? Can you retrieve my books from beneath the rubble?”
They tried. They risked their lives, digging through jagged concrete and twisted metal that once was our sanctuary. As they searched, an airstrike hit nearby! They survived by a miracle, but when they returned, my brother’s voice was heavy with a bitterness I had never heard before: “We almost died because of your books, Rawan. They are gone.”
In that moment, I felt a crushing wave of shame. I began to believe that survival was the only thing that mattered, that dreams, literature, and intellectual pursuit were luxuries that the displaced could no longer afford.
I felt as though everything that once formed “Rawan” had been torn away from me.
In January 2025, during a brief and fragile pause in the violence, we finally returned to the ruins of our home. My room was no longer a room; it was a graveyard of grey ash and pulverized stone. There were no shelves left, only fragments of paper—torn, jagged, and soaked by the winter rain.
But the cold was relentless. The displacement had left us shivering, our bones aching from the dampness of the tents and the ruins. We needed fire to survive. We needed fire to survive, heat to boil water, cook what little food we had, and keep the frost at bay.
I asked my brothers to scavenge the remains of my library, not for a shelf, but for the hearth. I stood in a silence so heavy it felt like stone while we gathered the torn pages.
These were the books that had built my personality. These were the poets who taught me how to feel and the historians who taught me how to remember. Now, they were nothing more than dry scrap. I watched as the first page caught the flame. I watched the ink, words I had underlined, ideas I had cherished, curl and blacken.
The fire was hungry. It didn’t care if it was consuming a masterpiece or a textbook. The labor of a lifetime and the scribbles of a moment vanished with the same effortless hiss.
It was indifferent to the weight of the words it devoured. To the fire, a sonnet tasted no different than a grocery list. It simply chewed through the paper. To the flame, it was all just fuel! It felt as though I were burning my own soul just to stay warm.
As the smoke rose, I felt a part of my past, my present, and my future evaporating into the grey sky of Gaza. I was feeding my identity to the furnace of survival. But as I sat by that fire, staring into the glowing embers of my life’s work, my father’s voice pulled me back from the edge of despair.
“Don’t lose yourself in the rubble, Rawan,” he said, his eyes reflecting the orange glow. “You have a future, and no bomb can take that away.”
My mother reached out, her hand warm from the very fire we had built, and whispered, “The fire consumed the paper, but it could not destroy your will. The books are not in the ash; they are in you.”
It was in that moment, shivering by the ghost of my library, that I realized a profound truth. I was not burning knowledge. I was witnessing its final transformation. The books had already done their work. They had shaped my mind, sharpened my intellect, and fortified my spirit long before the first match was struck. My books gave me warmth twice: once through their wisdom and one final time through their flames.
The fire that tried to erase my past became the fuel for my future. I realized that while they could destroy the physical Islamic University of Gaza, they could not destroy the “university” within me. I chose to resist not with a weapon, but with my pen. I chose to write a new chapter: one of unbreakable perseverance.
I returned to my studies online, typing assignments on a cracked screen amidst the wreckage. I studied while drones buzzed overhead and the world looked away. And I didn’t just pass; I triumphed. I graduated from the Islamic University of Gaza with a GPA of 91.76, ranking first in my class.
My room remains a memory, and my library remains ash, but I am rising. I am soaring higher than the flames that tried to consume me. I have learned that the most important library is the one you carry within your spirit, the one that no fire can ever reach. I will be a teacher. I will teach my students that even when the world is reduced to ash, we can still use that ash to write our names in the stars. I will never stop dreaming. From desolation, my new aspirations have already begun to bloom.
From Desolation New Aspirations Will Bloomby Rawan Hamada
April 11, 2026
Image courtesy of Rawan Hamada
