"Broken Reality"
I’ve been living there since my return, in the stories of civil wars, torture, rape and bombings. The ocean in front of me and the dead of night only takes me back to the old cobblestone streets of Aleppo and the little children selling fruits and bread in those dark alleys under the bridge. He is a memory, and not a story. Mehmet was the kind stranger who organized my exit, wrote a note for me in Arabic for my smuggler who helped me across the border into Turkey. Today I am alive in the land of the living while he breathes barely only in my restless mind.

My indebtedness to him haunts me in my sleep when I hear the despair, the fear and helplessness of millions of him dying inside and living outside those borders. How do I sleep in this silence that deafens me with the sirens of murder that is being committed every day? The world must believe this hollow city of crashed limbs, underground births and broken men does not exist. They are my reality’s horrors forgotten in tales of peace. They do not welcome my life nor the silence of sleep.