Ahmad Ibsais
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Memory tastes like ash on my tongue, shatters like bone between my teeth. I walk through clean streets where no blood pools, yet my shoes are always wet.
 

In the supermarket, plastic bags whisper of a father's hands that once gathered fruits, now gather fragments no parent should ever have to name.
 

In my dreams, bodies become smoke become sky become the air I cannot stop breathing. 

 

He was a student, ink-stained fingers. He was me in another timeline, flesh dissolving into flame, coursework turned to cinders.
 

Children's hands, small universes of possibility, now know the weight of mops, cleaning their mother’s blood from their kitchen floor, learning the chemistry of loss—how it thickens, refuses to disappear completely.
 

My day is partitioned: 8 AM: brush teeth 9 AM: drown in absent faces 12 PM: pretend to eat
lunch 3 PM: carry ghosts beneath my ribs 7 PM: watch others laugh.
 

"How are you?" they ask. And I almost say, "I am haunted by plastic bags, by children forced to clean what violence left behind, by flames that never stop burning."  Instead, I say "Fine."
 

We will not leave these memories. They have corseted our days, speared our nights, become the edifice in which we dwell.
 

I eat dinner while remembering. I sleep while remembering. I breathe while remembering. This is how we live now: half here, half there, fully nowhere.