---
Days passed like decades.
Life in Gaza wasn't merely survival—it was a constant battle to hold onto one's humanity. There was no difference between the young and the old; everyone lived under the same crushing weight of sorrow and loss.
Every morning, Adam woke not to an alarm clock, but to fear. He walked through shattered streets to a school that barely stood, its walls fractured, its air thick with silence.
"What if there was a school far from this land?"
He often wondered, staring at a chalkboard scarred more by war than by learning.
But no matter how far his thoughts wandered, they always circled back—to his father, Mustafa.
A man who once told him,
"Life isn't just about passing days, my son. It's about carving light into darkness. Hope, even when everything tells you to surrender."
Yet hope had become scarce in these times.
The silence of the city grew heavier. It wasn't peace—it was suffocation. And within that silence, voices began to echo from inside his heart.
"Do I have to be who the war shaped me to be? Or can I be someone else?"
One day, as Adam walked through a street where ghosts outnumbered the living, he saw a boy—around his age, yet worn down by life.
That was Ali.
His face was lined with the kind of sorrow that doesn't belong to the young. His eyes were tired, his shoulders hunched by invisible burdens.
Adam approached gently.
"Are you okay?"
Ali looked at him and gave a faint, weary smile.
"I think so. But who can really be okay in Gaza?"
The words struck Adam like a wound—deep, raw, silent.
Is that what it meant to live here? To keep pretending?
But day after day, Adam found himself drawn to Ali. Their conversations were never shallow. They spoke as if their souls had waited years to be heard.
One evening, under a sky that rarely revealed its stars, Ali said:
"Hope? We don't wait for it. We create it. Like a fire in the chest—we light it ourselves, no one's going to do it for us."
It wasn't just a quote. It was salvation.
Ali became more than a friend—he became a mirror. Adam saw his own pain reflected in Ali's eyes, but he also saw something else: the flicker of resistance, the shimmer of survival.
And one night, after walking home alone, Adam paused in the middle of a quiet street and whispered to himself:
"We will live. Even if the world forgets us, even if tomorrow never comes—we will live. For those who died believing in the light.
This is my promise to you, Father.
And to every soul buried beneath this broken land."
In the heart of war's shadows, a flicker of light was born.
It was called friendship… and the will to keep going.
---