by Hanan Al Hammal
There was a room I once created. It was painted with dark red colors and memories that are now far gone. That room smelled like the roses I went to pick with my mother back when I was 6, and the freshly baked bread that my neighbor would bake every morning. It felt like the first time I held my little brother’s hand and the way the sun would caress my skin at 6:00am. Eventually, that room became my only home.
It was a calm Friday morning when my brother and I played hide and go seek in the park. In the midst of me counting to 10, I heard my mother’s piercing scream begging us to run back to her as quickly as possible; thus I ran in between the crowd attempting to uncover a path to grasp her arm while I began to feel the pouring rain completely drenching my skin, as the deafening, ear-piercing sound of gunshots echoed in my ears. I started seeing all the Trevi fountains, where I and all the other children would toss a coin and make a wish, turn into blood pools. I saw swings swaying back and forth, yet no children were sitting on them. Instead, they were falling off of those swings, slowly like those droplets of rain, and gently, just like the way the moon kisses the sun goodbye.
I couldn’t quite comprehend what was happening, especially since I was only seven, but somehow, fear forced itself into my heart, scuttling through my veins, spreading its poison into my chest. There were people standing over their loved ones’ corpses, holding them the way a baby holds his mother’s finger once he’s born; tightly, vigorously, yet tenderly; with rivers streaming down their cheeks and agony filling up their hearts.
I then ran back to my mother. She took me to an underground bunker and then rushed back into the battlefield to search for my brother. A couple of hours later, when the world finally went silent and all the gunshots were hushed, my father came to pick me up from the bunker as he held 2 of the most precious people to my heart in his arms and told me to close my eyes while he patted my back. That day, my brother never came out of his hiding spot, and an empty space filled my heart. I took a final glance at my mother and brother’s face, and I saw my brother holding a daisy firmly in his hand, while his other one intertwined with my mother’s. On her face rested the most beautiful and tranquil smile I have ever seen. Perhaps that was the smile she held when she finally found my brother or the fact that she knew I was safe, but either ways I could not have seen a more pleasant smile in my life.