Refugee The Diary Of Ali Ismail -

Tonight, the stars are very bright. The coast guard’s light is a white dot on the horizon. It might be rescue. It might be return. I don’t know which is scarier.

When the water started seeping through the floor, Tarek took off his leather shoes. He didn’t throw them overboard. He held them up.

We don’t run away from death. We scoop it out with our finest possessions.

Note to the reader: This entry was found sealed inside a plastic bag, wedged between the inner and outer hull of a deflated dinghy washed ashore on Lesvos. The ink is smeared, but the pencil marks are legible. refugee the diary of ali ismail

The man next to me, a dentist from Aleppo named Tarek, keeps checking his phone. There is no signal. The battery is at 4%. He is scrolling through photos of his dental clinic. White tiles. A poster about flossing. It looks like a museum of another universe.

I drew a map in the condensation on the window of the bus heading to the coast. My mother thought I was drawing a cloud. But I was drawing the olive grove behind our house in Homs. The one where my brother and I buried a tin box of marbles in 2011. The marbles were blue like the sky before the jets came.

War exported me. Bombs exported my neighbor, the baker. Fear exported the girl who sat in front of me in chemistry class (she could name all the elements, but she couldn't name a single safe country). Tonight, the stars are very bright

Today, I stopped being a number.

By the time you reach the water, you are a ghost wearing running shoes.

I realized something strange:

First, you lose the sound of church bells (or the call to prayer, depending on your street). Then you lose the specific smell of your mother’s stove—lentils and cumin. Then you lose the ability to walk down a street without looking up at the rooftops.

"These are Italian," he said. "I saved three years for these. My father never owned leather shoes."

The father of three behind us starts to pray. The teenager from Idlib is laughing—hysterically, I think—because the moon is very bright and we are all going to die in a raft meant for ten people that holds forty-seven. It might be return