He is walking with the box clenched tightly to his chest. It contains little nothings, but in Gaza some of the items he’s collected were hard to come by. Most space is taken up by his love letters. She’s been getting one or two a day for over a year now. Luna says he makes her fly. ‘I feel like Juliet with you.’ A reaction that makes his heart soar to the heavens. The letters are written in English, because Luna studies English literature in college. The university was bombed three days ago. All classes had already been suspended anyway. Luna is at home with her sister, Aisha and their mother, Zara. Harun, their father died six years ago. He was a construction worker. Killed in an accident. Negligence from a sleep deprived colleague. A tool box dropped down an elevator shaft. Harun was bending forward while welding and the box hit him directly on the neck. The doctors said he must have died instantly. At least the girls and their mother could take some comfort in that. Rawad has no car, so he is walking three miles through town to reach Luna’s apartment block. Pandemonium reigns. All traffic rules are out the window. He has to dodge cars, motorcycles and donkeys pulling overloaded carts. He sees families who have thrown all their belongings in a pram. Underneath his feet he can hear the crunchy sound of glass. Not a single building in town has intact windows now. Same for many cars.

Rawad licks his teeth. He doesn’t want to kiss her with dirty teeth. He’s cleaned them with an orange peel. A life hack he read about online. There’s no more tooth paste and the water is too precious. In his mind he lists the contents of the box for the millionth time. He loves to imagine how she will feel unwrapping the box and examining each item. There’s Turkish delight, five candles, very useful these days, bread and two bottles of milk he managed to obtain by swapping the chessboard his grandfather carved for him. He will not tell Luna how he paid for these items. Though they have never played chess she has always admired the beauty of the board and the pieces. His grandfather used ebony wood. That was when his grandparents lived in Jaffa. They died a few years ago in Khan Younis. There was exactly one year between their deaths. The unlucky one was his grandfather, because he outlived his wife by 365 days. He knows Luna would scold him for swapping that chessboard just for a little food that won’t last even two days.

Absent in the crowded streets are Hamas fighters. Rawad hasn’t seen a single one since Israel started bombing. He has one friend who may or may not be a Hamas member. Even though they meet up three or four times a week the friend has never confirmed. A week ago Rawad saw a bombed out apartment. He saw a foot of a child still in one of the shoes the child was wearing at the time of death. He helped look for survivors, but they found none. An uncle came with plastic shopping bags to collect the remains of his family members. Rawad saw him pick up the foot and the shoe. He retched. After that he asked the friend if Hamas would take him. The friend answered that Hamas didn’t need him. That if he wanted to help Palestine he should make many babies with Luna and maybe open a Palestinian themed restaurant in New York or Paris or Rome one day and talk to customers about Palestinian culture. Rawad loves to cook, most of all he likes to create a setting for people to unwind in. But he has no real aspirations to open a restaurant or to leave Gaza. He is just fine being a barber. He enjoys talking to his clients and to see the look on their faces when he is done restyling them. Rawad is almost there now. They have been texting the entire time. He’s letting her guess what could be inside the box. He calls her ‘soul of my soul’, which is more common in Iraq than in Palestine. ‘How can your soul have a soul?’, asks Luna often, but secretly she likes all the nicknames he has for her. Her favorite is ‘my daily bread’.

Apart from the letters she hasn’t guessed a single item correctly. Luna will never get to see the items. Not intact anyway. She will find a picture of them in Rawad’s phone. The access code is her birth year. 2003. The letters she will dry. Rawad always wrote them with a classic fountain pen and the milk has turned many of the sentences he sometimes spent hours perfecting into blue blotches. Rawad reached her apartment building. His last message to her was: ‘Your troubadour has arrived’. The apartment block across the street got hit by one of Israel’s heaviest bombs. Debris flew everywhere. He was still alive when Luna rushed out. She cradled his head in her lap. There was blood. And there was milk. He asked her seven times if the letters were still legible. Without checking she kept saying yes. She keps rubbing the hair and kissing his forehead. She said she would read the letters twice every day for as long as she lived. That made him smile. ‘I think you can still eat the bread’ were his last words to her. In the official statistics he was counted as a Hamas fighter.

Luna read about the deal with the chessboard in Rawad’s whatsapp messages which she couldn’t resist opening. She traded all her English novels to retrieve it. Some leatherbound Dickens. In her flight to the south one chessboard was easier to carry than 46 classic literature tomes. She was surprised anyone would accept them as payment for anything in times like these. In the south Luna, her sister and her mother, were handed a three year old boy with minor burn wounds. The doctor had just run out on the street with the boy and had pushed the child into Luna’s arms. ‘If you don’t take him am afraid he’ll die.’ Luna shouted questions, but the doctor only said ‘Am too tired!’ and walked off. On the boy’s arm was written WCNSF. Wounded Child, No Surviving Family. Luna named the boy Rawad.