Dented Bullets
I was standing on the roof of a building. I could see the entire city from that point, but I shouldn’t have been able to. There were supposed to be tall buildings around the one I was on, but there weren’t. They had been removed in the name of freedom. They had been destroyed in the name of rebirth. I could clearly see the city, with its beige coloured buildings, like the desert sand, standing amid all of the destruction. I was incredibly sad that I was leaving. After just one month since coming back, I felt like I had never left. Maybe that was the way I wished things had happened.
As I watched the wounded city from high above, I heard the Imam singing at the top of his lungs from the Mosque a few kilometers away, praising the lord. I couldn’t help but feel a sense of irony at the scene. But at that moment, I finally understood him….
Six years had passed since war had erupted in my country, and since I had been home. I was sitting in a small car with my family on the way to Aleppo. My father was in the passenger seat, and my brother and I were crammed in the back with our mother. We were sitting in silence, watching the desert road, and waiting for our arrival.
After a while, as we approached the outskirts of the city, we started seeing buildings that were half intact, with the other halves forming hills of rubble around them. As we were passing through narrow roads and pathways, I watched the city around me, but I didn’t recognize it. I didn’t recognize the city I was born in, the city where I had gone to school and played with my friends, where I had fallen in love for the first time. I felt alien in my own home, and I was ashamed because of it. I felt guilty.
I entered our building and started going up the stairs floor by floor. There was a doctor’s office on the first floor. I waited for him to come out and tell me that I would grow up to become a doctor like him, as he always used to, but no one came out. When I reached the second floor, I hurried up, expecting the old lady who used to live there to yell at me through the door for being too noisy. The only noise, however, came from my footsteps in the dark and silent building. On the third floor, I hoped that our neighbour’s daughter would open their door and greet me, even though I knew they had left a few years ago.
I had gone up those stairs thousands of times, yet a feeling of dread had come over me. I was hesitating, but I sensed a force pulling me up, a force full of memories, longing and fear. On the fourth floor was a dark green door; dented and discoloured with age, yet still firm and in place. It struck me that everything I had encountered in the city was exactly like this door, damaged, but still somehow standing. As the rest of my family caught up behind me, I inserted my key and turned it, surprised by how smoothly the door opened.
I was greeted by our dead plants by the door, the soil in the pots was completely black like ash. My heart sank when I walked into the living room. It looked like a hurricane had passed through our house, hurling our belongings here and there. Whoever this hurricane was, he…or more likely, they had been thorough. After scouring the house, they had dragged our small eating table to the middle of the living room, drunk any alcohol that we had, and even popped two confetti bursts that they’d found lying around in the house. The scene was so hilariously tragic that I couldn’t help but laugh and cry at the same time.
We spent the next few weeks cleaning up the mess that our guests had left behind for us. One day, when I was filling the water tank on the roof with whatever water we had managed to find, I was suddenly distracted by a bright glare that attracted my eyes. On closer inspection, I found that it was a bullet. Then I realized that there were a lot of bullets scattered around the rooftop. I picked up a few and held them up in my hand. They were heavily dented and scratched, and they were surprisingly hot. The sun was scorching, and I thought that they’d melt in my hand. Their weight was pushing on my entire body. Those bullets were shot with the intention of killing, but ended up on a random rooftop. As I looked at the bullets, I realized that the people of this city were holding failed bullets like them for years, and I felt that I didn’t have the right to hold them.
The sun was burning so hot that I had started to feel dizzy. I was haunted by the feeling that the city was punishing me for what I’d done. I knew I was leaving soon, and I knew that if I walked away at that moment, I would never be able to see the city from there again. The Imam’s voice was emanating from the Mosque and echoing through the buildings around it. It sounded like the entire city was singing. It dawned on me that the scene in front of me wasn’t ironic at all. He wasn’t praising God after all that had happened, he was praising God despite of everything. The city wasn’t punishing me. The city wasn’t even mad at me in the first place. The bullets didn’t feel as heavy anymore, and the sun didn’t feel as hot anymore. I was finally a part of the city. I could finally leave.
