By Mohammad Shouman | Managing Director

For more than a year, the whiteboard behind the door of my room stood untouched. Inscribed on it were to-do lists, formulas of Fourier series, Euler’s formula, my name, colored squiggles, and one too many digits of Pi.

I left home shortly after the bombings started. It was a rational decision, as the indiscriminate killings were likely to extend to my neighborhood too. I left and took some valuables, hoping that our apartment would survive the war. Every day, as I heard stories of rubble replacing friends’ houses, my hope thinned. Every day, as I remembered my martyred friend, I grew weary of my worries as nothing mattered more than the wellbeing of our people; our parents, siblings, and classmates would soon become numbers on news reports. Every day, I saw men weep on campus, in the streets, at cafes, and on live TV. It became an instinct to avoid them so I may not hear stories of their dead families. It became a habit to prosecute my empathy until it took a plea deal that numbed my mind.

On foggy days, it was sulfur smoke that filled the air. Rainy days were heavenly miracles extinguishing fires that ravaged al Basta at four in the morning. Thunder was a screeching JDAM demolishing a building complex near my school. And on good days, birds and bees left to make room for the singing MK drone which we ran around Hamra to scare away like children chasing the town dog back into its owner’s backyard.

The war stripped me of so much soul that upon my return to my unharmed room, I felt disgusted about having survived the bloodbath. As I scanned, I looked at my whiteboard behind the door and realized that I did not clean up the writings that had compiled over the final exams of the summer semester and the rather ambitious academic spirit of the beginning of the fall.

I couldn’t get myself to erase anything. I could not even move the three pieces of paper I had stuck on with broken magnets. One read my plans to finish my math degree, outlining the courses I had to take, which suddenly felt like a chore. Another displayed three hundred digits of Pi that I had memorized, now long forgotten, each neatly noted in a cell of squared paper. My eyes shifted back to how they had all been flimsily held up. Magnets don’t really break, they multiply, but in that moment, all I could see was the shattered edges of the black coin tabs. On the grey magnet strips, remnants of glue distracted me from the backflow of tears waiting to erupt. I turned away and decided to let go for now. I kept myself away for a long time. My room, over the year, evolved around my work, school, and habits. My whiteboard sat in the corner like a heartbroken mother at her only son’s wedding. It seemed to be a representation of the sole piece of me unaltered by the war, preserved as the writing of the Sumerians etched in stone.

I now realize that this is not the whole truth. Even though the black, red, and green markings on it were in fact unaltered, unaffected by the dust that crawled around our abandoned home, no part of me has been left unchanged ever since the bombings stopped. No part of me remained to even be represented, as the sadness instilled by the war rebuilt me. Like Theseus to his ship, like a historical revisionist to Soviet glory, it has been re-assembling me wholly. It is so profound that it overshadows my tangible past and abstracts in its places heresies of what could have been. Nevertheless, it no longer feels foreign. These days it lingers on my actions like oud on unwashed clothes. It substitutes my love for hate and all hate for indifference. Before the war I used to yearn for abundance. Now it feels natural to be a drop in the bucket and a number on the screen.

As if the propaganda that dehumanized us had been true all along, I begin to solemnly accept that I cannot unburn our beautiful forests, un-wreck our cities, and un-scrub the blood of our people from the soil that has longed to soak it. Instead, on Christmas Eve, I scrubbed my whiteboard clean.