Flowers

Nouha loved flowers—she picked them wherever she found them: by the vast grove of olive trees where her brothers worked, along the city streets under the shadow of skyscrapers, and everywhere in between; her mother would beam ear to ear whenever she would witness this, calling Nouha “wardatī (my rose).”

One day, as Nouha bent over to pick a poppy, a strange, passing man on a bicycle shared with her a most troubling truth: “to pick a plant from God’s earth is, in a way, to kill it, or at least send it on death’s path.” This upset Nouha greatly; it wasn’t enough for her to simply bear witness to the flower’s beauty. She needed to possess it somehow…to hold it.

When Nouha told this to her father, he said nothing; instead, he ran out of their apartment, and didn’t come back for several hours. When he did, he was holding a poorly wrapped package made up of discarded newspaper. He handed it to Nouha, who eagerly ripped it open—inside was a loosely bound notebook and a 24-color crayon set. She smiled for the first time in what felt like ages. From then on, Nouha drew as a way to capture. At first her drawings were inspiring—images of blissful joy in its simplest, purest manifestation; but after the bombs fell into their lives, it became much harder to find flowers, and when she did, somehow all her shaking hands could manage were dreary reminders of everything she had lost.

Not much later, Nouha ran out of paper, so in the rare event that she did spot life amongst the wasteland that was once her home, she could not even attempt to draw it into her memory. Left without choice, Nouha started picking flowers again—perhaps death was, after all, a mercy.