Letters from Fadi and Adam

Fadi Naim – 09/06/2026

There are days when I catch myself remembering the smallest things– The sound of someone calling my name from another room, the feeling of walking somewhere without wondering if I would make it back, the comfort of knowing that tomorrow was simply another day.

War took those ordinary things from me slowly. I learned what it feels like to sleep while listening for danger, to wake up looking for the people you love, and to keep moving even when your heart is exhausted. I have seen things I wish I could erase from my memory, and experienced days when simply making it to nightfall felt like an achievement.

But perhaps the hardest part was watching myself change without being able to stop it. 

Sometimes I feel as if I am carrying two versions of myself. The one who still wakes up, speaks, smiles, and tries to keep going– and another one who remained somewhere in the life I lost.

I don’t know if I will ever become the person I was before.

Maybe surviving does not mean coming out whole. 

Sometimes it means learning how to live with the pieces of yourself that never came back.

Fadi Naim – 08/18/2026

If I could ask the world to understand one thing about me in Gaza, what would it be?

I would ask you to imagine waking up every morning and wondering whether the people you love will still be beside you by nightfall. Imagine watching the place you called home disappear, while the simplest things–food, clean water, electricity, and safety–become things you can only hope for. Things that should have been basic human rights have become wishes. Now imagine doing all of this while trying to comfort your family and telling them, “Everything will be okay,” even when you don’t know if it will.

This is what life has become for so many of us in Gaza.

But please don’t remember us only for our suffering. Remember that before we became headlines, we were people with ordinary dreams: a safe home, a peaceful morning, a future for our children, and the chance to live without fear.

If my voice can reach someone outside Gaza, I don’t ask you to feel sorry for me. I ask you to remember me as a human being. And when the news moves on to another story, please don’t let the people of Gaza disappear with it.

This is only a small glimpse of what I wish the world would ask me about every day. It is only a tiny part of what I carry inside me, because there are things I have seen and felt that I still cannot put into words.

I have begun to fear something almost as much as the war itself: I am afraid that one day I will forget the painful scenes I witnessed every day. And I am afraid that, instead of forgetting them, they will follow me every night in my dreams–returning as nightmares that never end, becoming ghosts and a curse that I carry for the rest of my life.

Sometimes I feel that silence has become part of my personality. That I have become invisible, like the dead in their graves–unable to change what has happened to them, unable to change what is happening to me. I feel like I am living while a part of me has already died.

Life has become gray, almost beyond recognition. The familiar features of our lives have faded, and a person’s greatest hope is no longer something extraordinary. It is simply to find enough food for the day, to bring home a piece of bread, and to know that the people they love will make it through another night.

And there are moments when the weight of everything I have seen becomes so unbearable that I find myself envying those who no longer have to wake up and carry it.