A Family Home Abandoned

“I’m going to sell all the furniture in the house and leave the city. I can’t stand the overwhelming tension and fear anymore, or the fact that it’s impossible to move about the city freely because of Islamic State. Your father will find us wherever we end up.”

At first, my mother’s words didn’t seem so painful. In fact, they were somehow reassuring, especially after the coalition airstrikes began and Islamic State set up a base in the primary school across from our house, the same school my siblings had once attended and on whose courts we’d played basketball for over three years.

Despite the fact that Islamic State was still holding my father captive, I felt a relative sense of calm, maybe at the thought of the rest of my family moving to a safer area. But that lasted no more than a few days. It began to fall apart as soon as my mother started to sell off the furniture, and it was replaced by the feeling that it was our actual memories which were being carted out of the house and scattered far and wide.

After the first item was sold, I suddenly began to cry, even though the furniture was quite old anyway and my mother had wanted to replace it before the revolution upended the whole situation in the country.

To be forced to sell off your furniture in this way seemed impossibly painful, particularly since some of the things were almost as old as we were. I’d never imagined that one day my father’s desk, the one that had been around ever since I could remember, would end up in someone else’s home. Or that his valuable books, collected since his youth, some acquired in secret, some brought home from abroad, some extremely rare, would be packed up in cardboard boxes in the attic after they’d been arranged and displayed with such care.

All that furniture, painstakingly collected by my father over the 20-plus years of his career as a doctor, sold off so quickly and easily in his absence while he was locked away somewhere. I couldn’t bear the thought that somebody else would sleep in my bed and rest their head on my pillow, or that some other family would make their own memories in our house, replacing ours.

Where had all our laughter gone? The evenings spent in each other’s company, the echoes of our voices, our conversations, even our tears?

There is nothing in our house today but loneliness, cold and loss, nothing but the sighs we heaved over the year of my father’s absence. Nothing else.

I tried to pull myself together and forget how our house was being slowly emptied of its furniture in readiness for someone else to move in. The day finally came for my family to leave – October 13, 2014. Although I knew the date in advance, I still found I was distraught when it arrived.

My throat tightened in dread every time I saw another post from my family on Facebook. My tears began falling, no matter how simple the post was or how unrelated it was to the subject of their departure.

That day, I felt alienated and exiled, even though I was still in Aleppo, still in Syria. I knew that there was no chance of us returning to Raqqa even if my father were to be released that very day. After all the pain the city had put us through, and after the agony it had inflicted on my father, it would be impossible to remain. Although I was fully convinced of this, I still felt driven to the verge of madness and tears. I couldn’t bear the thought that I would never again walk the city’s streets, and never watch its rain fall or breathe in the scent of its great river, the Euphrates. I couldn’t bear the thought that when my father was released from prison, he would find nothing the way it once had been. We would never be reunited in that house.

I cried without stopping that entire day. I felt torn apart by the agony of it all, especially when I saw the photos of our now empty house.

I woke up the next morning, my cheeks stinging from all the tears I had shed. The day before had been a nightmare, but I still had hope, somewhere, that our laughter would ring out again in our home.