🍄🐣 Mariya Sorrel 🐣🍄

Wounds do not heal if you are starving. All the medicine & care in the world cannot repair a starving body. In Gaza, Palestinians under constant bombing & bulletfire do not have food -or- medicine. My own life, my ideas, the whole world feels small in this light, Gaza's light.

This morning, I was supposed to go and prepare the medical tent. There was still work to be done: a few tarpaulins to fasten, some chairs and a table to find. It should have been a simple day of labor, a day of purpose. But in our land, even the simplest day conspires against meaning. My mother told me that a store nearby was selling chicken, real chicken, at a price decreed by the Ministry of Economy. In another world, this would have been nothing, a trivial errand. But here in Gaza, the rumor of food moves faster than hope itself. I hesitated for a moment: should I finish my work for the clinic, or chase after a meal for my family? A man can live without purpose, perhaps, but not without feeding his mother. So I went. At a quarter to nine, I arrived to find a line already stretching beyond sight. I stood among the others, hollow-eyed men and women who had forgotten the meaning of haste or dignity. We no longer queue for food. We queue for existence. The sun climbed, hours passed, and just when I reached the door, they told us the chicken was gone. Gone. After three hours of waiting, gone, like everything else in this life that vanishes just as your fingers begin to touch it. I felt no anger, only the quiet paralysis of a man who has learned that outrage is useless. Someone said there was meat being sold elsewhere. Meat! The word itself sounded biblical, ancient, forbidden, miraculous. I climbed onto a cart pulled by a half-broken car and let it carry me through the sandy streets, the midday sun above like an accusing god, the dust entering my lungs like the residue of centuries. I thought of nothing except this: that I might bring back flesh to my home after months of absence, that perhaps my mother might cook again, that the house might once more smell of life instead of canned death. She called as I was on my way. “Did you find anything?” she asked. “Or shall I start with the tins?” “Wait for me,” I told her. “I’ll bring meat.” I believed it when I said it. I wanted to believe it. At one in the afternoon I reached the new store. Another queue. Another congregation of silent faces, united by despair. I waited until four. When I finally entered, I found chaos: people shouting, pushing, their eyes wide with that same trembling hunger that turns human beings into something half divine, half animal. Then came the words, shouted from behind the counter: “It’s gone. All of it.” And in that moment, something broke in me, not from anger, but from the realization that our lives here are no longer measured by years or achievements, but by the distance between one failed queue and the next. How long can a man live like this, in a time where time itself has no meaning, where days are consumed by waiting, and waiting consumes the soul? What is left of human dignity when survival itself becomes a queue that always ends in nothingness? I walked back through the market, my body moving though my spirit had stopped long ago. Around me, the stalls overflowed with cheap sweets, candies, and bright packages that glowed like false promises. Sugar everywhere, the illusion of nourishment, the mockery of life. We have grown swollen from emptiness, like balloons filled not with breath but with airless sweetness that will soon burst. I bought some of those sweets in the end, not out of desire but shame. Shame to return to my mother’s waiting eyes with empty hands after nine hours of existence. I handed her the package as if it were a confession. And as I watched her unwrap it, I thought that perhaps this is what war truly is. Not the bombs, not the rubble, but this slow corrosion of meaning, this transformation of human beings into shadows chasing the rumor of sustenance. So tell me, if you can, Has the war really ended? Or has it merely changed its form, sinking deeper into our flesh, where it will go on living long after the last gun has fallen silent? #WoundedGaza