You no longer remember what it was like to have a full stomach. For 20 months you have been surviving on lentils, bread baked from mouldy flour and on lucky days, some rice. You haven’t had meat in 17 months. Not counting a half rotten chicken leg you found in a ceramic pot in a bombed out house. You vomitted fluids from an almost empty digestive tract for three days till your eyes felt like they would pop out off your eye sockets.

You have seen your mother die when schrapnel cut her throat and vocal chords. Your mother’s last words were drowned out in her gargling her own blood. That same mother that always urged you to use your voice. She would have loved to see you become a journalist or moderator. As a child you were a real chatterbox and very inquisitive. Now you feel like uttering any word at all is a waste of energy. You are painfully aware that before the bombs came words. Endless streams of words, aimed to dehumanize you and legitimize the coming slaughter. You struggle to see words as your friend.

You have seen what was left of your father, an electrician frantically trying to repear solar panels in his last moments on this earth, after a hospital wall collapsed on him.

Some metal rod from the concrete went in at the top of his head and came out through his chin. You tried to close his eyes, but it was impossible. His body felt like cold marble and his head had swollen to twice its former size. It had taken a while to locate him and his body had decomposed so much that his belly had swollen, then burst. Children should never see the insides of their parent’s body, but there are now many things happening that go against what the human soul can put up with without losing all his or her cheerful parts.

Six months ago your two older brothers were hit by artillery while they themselves were riding a donkey cart full with the injured of a bomb exploding in a tent camp on the outskirts of town. They were on the way to a makeshift field hospital run by Irish, Norwegian, Egyptian and Indonesian doctors. All the Palestinian doctors in the area are dead or have been ‘detained.’

You have walked past dead bodies in the most strangely twisted positions lying on the side of the street. Several times you have stepped on the hands and legs of the dead, because you didn’t spot them at night. Once you stepped on a woman’s stomach and a putrid stench arose. Slush covered your feet. Almost impossible to get rid of without a functioning shower. You traded all your school books for the last can of Chat Cola. Not to drink it, but to wash the stench of a dead woman off your foot. Some things are more important than calories, even now.

It’s not like anyone would notice the smell, because you have nobody left. You are now a member of a roving band of raggamuffins, all orphans, all between the ages of 4 and 20. Some of the youngest ones have gone feral and forage for food crawling on all fours through rubble and dirt. Some will ferociously attack anyone they spot eating something.

You have decided that the best way to survive is to take someone even more vulnerable than yourself under your wings. You have sort of adopted a little girl who doesn’t remember her own name or refuses to say her own name, maybe because that name belongs to a life she knows no longer exists. You call her Rainbow. She was with you today when it happened, but luckily she was unharmed and she’s seen far worse things than what happened to you today.

Today you were queuing for food when a bullet hit you from the side. The bullet snipped off the nipple of your right breast and went on to cut a wide mangled lane through your left breast.

A doctor born and raised in Manchester treated you with exceptional care, but ruined it all after he was done dressing your wounds by saying: ‘It’s nothing serious, you will recover, you will live.’

Nothing serious?

Your breasts have been defaced, desecrated, de-eroticized, before you had the chance to let any man devour them with his desire for you.

Now they have been devoured by greed and egos of grotesque sizes. Egos belonging to men who don’t know how to touch a woman’s breasts to set her soul on fire anyway.

This is the first time in 20 months you are considering to take your own life.

You know that this is not what your parents wanted. You know they wanted you to live. To live and have many children is the perfect victory over the invaders.

But who will want you now?

Maybe some half blind cripple?

You shudder at the thought.

You have always imagined your husband would be a devastatingly handsome young man who would fall for you, because you are not all giggles like the other girls. He would fall for you because of your beautiful handwriting or the intense way you read books out loud to yourself on a park bench. He would fall for your mystery and your overactive, always ‘on’ mind.

But now?

You weigh pros and cons of hanging yourself.

It would also be a win for all those people in the US who think you are the lowest life form on this earth.

People who shrug off what is happening to you and others. People who would lose their minds and have Karenesque temper tantrums if they had to live with running water for two days or no functioning refrigerator. Weak people who enjoy your suffering, because it distracts them from the suffering of their own meaningless, quietely desperate and obscure lives.

Rainbow grabs your hand and pushes something into your hand.

‘It’s a pebble. The doctor can sow it on your titty.’

To hear that word coming out of such a little girl makes you laugh out loud. You’re so surprised you hurt a muscle in your neck as you jerk backwards while laughing.

Where did she even learn that word.

Rainbow remains deadly serious though and looks at the pebble and at your chest, as if figuring out how she can attach the pebble to your breast with her own hands.

Then you hear her mumble.

‘Nadia will be doctor too when I will be big.’

You ask her if Nadia is her name.

She runs off.

You hear her sing: ‘Nadia, Nadia, don’t eat the orange before lunch. First lunch, then orange! Nadia, Nadia, no orange now, first lunch.’

What do you do when you have a little girl who only has her name left from the first four or five years of her life? A girl who speaks with more certainty about the future that you could ever emulate now.

You get up and you go back to the doctor who treated your body, but put a dagger in your soul and your aspirations.

‘Tell me anything I can do to help and I will work all day. There is nothing that can shock me.’

The doctor tells you, you should rest with your wound.

When you insist he tells you that they can always use help doing laundry. With no washing machines available women spend hours scrubbing dirt and blood out of clothes and bedding and old bandages.

When after three days of hard labour which reminds you with every movement of your arms of what was done to the delicate ambassadors of your womanhood, you can finally present an orange to your rainbow, Nadia, you feel like you have personally defeated all the forces in this world that want you dead. Forces that don’t know why they find the deaths of your family members supremely acceptable. People who will adopt any opinion their leaders tell them to have. Why? To fit in, to be part of a tribe, to mask their crushing feeling of not having power over anything.

Nadia gets an orange. She is overjoyed and stamps her feet.

You realize that every act of love gets stored into a person’s system, a system that most likely doesn’t vanish at death.

So every act of love becomes part of the world’s memoir. A reservoir of love.

Your every act of kindness is now your military offensive against the savages.

You risk losing your breasts to gangrene, but you realize that everyone who has contributed to building a world that made it possible for your breasts to be disfigured already has gangrene of the soul.

And you would never in a million years want to swap places with those who need to support and clamor for violence to have the illusion that their voices matter.

Some people are so ugly that no bullet in this world could make them even uglier.