I didn’t even know if my eyes were open.
After the chaos, everything seemed so calm. I sensed the dust covering my face. It seemed to block my nostrils, and as I tried to inhale through them, I felt I made it worse. I decided to breathe through my lips. I could feel my breath hitting one of the bricks. I heard a faint shout of an ambulance siren and then my breath was the only sound I could hear. One of my arms was trapped somewhere under the wooden edges of my bed, the other under what seemed like more heavy bricks. My toes, my legs, and my hair were jailed and sentenced not to move. I felt a lot of pain, but I couldn’t figure out where it was coming from. I was never trapped in so little a space. My world felt so narrow and sharp.
I was afraid. I waited and waited and, as my mother once advised me to do when I was afraid, I tried to recall all the joyful events in my life, though they were few: my older brother’s big wedding party, my grandmother coming back from Mecca and bringing me a singing doll, the last ’eid when I got my biggest ’eidiyya ever, my mother bringing us home a new baby—though I wondered if that was a happy event for me, but I had certainly seen the joy my parents had looking at that little thing.
My breath softly came back to my face, with the smell of grayish objects rather than a breeze carrying the scent of our garden plants, touching my nose and cheeks as if to comfort and tell me that everything will be okay. But a minute later I started crying. The sky was starless. And only then did I realize that my eyes were closed, for I started to feel my sticky eyelashes. It did not matter, opening and closing them were thoroughly the same. I cried so much that my tears, mixed with the dust on my face, felt like mud crawling to the edges of my cheeks and filling the canals of my ears. I must have been bleeding, because a horrible pain started growing in my chest. The back of my head seemed to pull me down further and further with every scream I made, and I felt I had enough strength to push everything around me away. But nothing seemed to move. I desperately needed to stand up and run to my mother’s warm hug. And just then it occurred to me. No one was coming to help me. There was no movement in any part of the house. I wept even harder.
I wanted to help. I tried to move. Only one muscle. A toe at a time. I felt something very sharp poking through my flesh.
I stopped crying. I waited. I bled.