I call it a place that I have never been to, my home(land). I always say that I hope to one day be able to go back to my homeland, yet I have no idea what I am going back to. I will go back to it, even though I have never been, because, to me, my homeland lives in the crevices of my brain. My brain does not know how to operate if not within the confines of my country’s context. Every book I read, every dish I eat, every conversation I am a part of, everything’s pretext is the same. You cannot know me and love me without knowing about my origins and ancestors, and you will never fully understand me without first understanding my country’s history.

I live in two universes, one where I currently exist, and the other where I am walking down the streets my Grandparents once walked down. I would have gone to school in the same buildings where my ancestors studied, and I would have understood the slang of my mother tongue. I would have picked the oranges off the trees and I would have understood what it meant when my Grandparents said that it is the most beautiful place in the world. I wish every single day that I could have experienced what it meant to have been raised there and have lived there, and I pray every day that I will experience it, someday. This dream universe sometimes feels more real than the one I exist in.

In the universe where I exist, I am expected to live as if nothing is wrong. No heartbreak is as painful as the one where you know that your people and your land are not okay. My eyes can witness the most beautiful places, yet I believe that nothing will ever be completely beautiful until my homeland is safe. Nothing can ever be completely joyful when I check the news every hour and read about the tragedies in English. A language that is not my mother tongue. A language that has only ever been used to either demonize us or teach the West about our struggle. I have grown to hate that I am more comfortable in English, a language that should have been considered a blessing to know, but has now only become a tool that has stripped me of my original identity. A language that I now have to use to teach others about the struggles of my people. Nothing will ever be as joyful or exciting or interesting as it used to be.

I have had to come to terms with the fact that beauty and pain can coexist and will coexist. While my people die, my friends will graduate and get married, people will have big accomplishments to celebrate, and jokes will continue to be funny. We will continue to see new places and admire the beauty of the Earth while coming to terms with the fact that I might never see the visual charm of my land. That the news cycle will move on and has moved on, but the people I love are not just news articles. The people I love have stopped being my immediate circle but have now gained new meaning altogether - every single person on that land and from that land is a person I love. They could have been a person I loved had I been there, had I been slightly less lucky (or what I would consider slightly more lucky).

As a kid, I never understood what it meant to feel ‘survivor’s guilt’, especially when you were never placed in a position to be the survivor of the event. It has been more than a year, 377 days to be exact, and for a year now, I understand it with more clarity than ever before. For a year now, I have had incessant thoughts of “why them and not me” followed quickly with “I wish it was me and not them”. That is not a cry for help, but the opposite. Every life on this planet is equally as worthy and precious as each other, and once that realization sets in, every life lost becomes equally as devastating as losing a loved one. My homeland is the best place in the world, but it is simultaneously filled with heartbreak and pain. But if being associated with my homeland meant living a life of feeling only pain, destruction, and despair, then I would still pick it up in a heartbeat.

Nothing is a greater honor than being from that land. Nothing can ever parallel.