When I walk back through memory, I’m confronted with a longing for a sight I fear I’ll never see again.
The two years I spent in Gaza before the morning of October 7 are my final record of when it was whole.
When I think of home, my mind settles on its shores, because the waves greet you with a kind of freedom.
The air is salty, biting. Each wave carries its own sound. Each sound its own universe.
It’s Gaza’s greatest paradox, feeling like the freest person in the world, in the world’s largest prison.
Each moment felt like it happened just for you.
On paper, life in Gaza was unbearably difficult. But it was also unbearably beautiful.
In the streets, the people were everywhere. We waited for the taxi to take us north of north, arriving at Beit Hanoun, the mother of magic.
Writing here from Canada, everything’s the polar opposite: streets filled with strangers walking by one another for the last time. But on one cold evening, as I sat on my balcony smoking a cigarette, I saw two people running and laughing, and they brought me back to Gaza’s streets.
It’s funny, how laughter cuts through the cold, cuts all the way to home.
I remember the old man sitting on his plastic chair in the shade during summer.
The same man warmed by the winter sun at noon.
The taxi that could take you to any part of Gaza, but you feel like it can take you anywhere in the world.
That was then, two million lives ago, two million memories. Mine is just one of them, and it’s all I have left of you. I’m grateful that I still have it.
I hope to return to you one day as a free man. In a free land, among the freest people in the world.
Mahmoud Nasser
Mahmoud Nasser is a Palestinian documentary photographer currently based in Toronto, Canada.
