By Malak Radwan   Here we are again. Time has folded in on itself, collapsing the distance between then and now into a suffocating present. Two years ago, on October 30th, a day that smelled of smoke and fear, the world was split in two along Salah al-Din Road. To the north, a trap. To the south, exile. And in Jabalia camp, we were the stubborn stones that refused to be moved, my family and I choosing the familiar terror of home over the unknown terror of flight. We remember the metallic growl of tanks advancing and how the air vibrated with menace near Beit Lahia. For a year and a half, we learned the shape of confinement. Our lives shrank to the size of a single house, our horizons limited by fear. We mapped the sounds of war: the whistle before impact, the shudder of walls, the frantic rhythm of our own hearts. We were the ones who stayed, who believed in the sanctity of roots even as the earth itself burned. Then came the false dawn of the truce in January 2025. A breath, a brief reprieve. People returned to Gaza City and witnessed a miracle, not of reconstruction, but of resurrection. The city breathed its people back in, and a fragile spirit flickered to life amid the ruins. We dared to think, perhaps, that the wheel had turned. But time in Gaza is not a straight line; it is a cruel cycle. Today, the news arrives like a recurring nightmare. The Netzarim axis is reinstated. The blade falls once again, severing north from south. The one-way road to the south is open again, a grotesque echo demanding another exodus. And this time, we are among those who left. We, the steadfast, have become the displaced. The understanding of what it means to be trapped, to be hunted by advancing steel, to feel the cold grip of a siege squeezing the air from our lungs, now travels with us. It is the ghost in our suitcase. Every news headline of encirclement, every report of tanks on the move, is not a distant bulletin; it is a key that unlocks the same old chamber of horrors inside us. Gaza has returned to point zero. The calendar has been pulled back to that October two years ago. The same roads are clogged with the same desperate journeys. The same fear marks the same faces. Yet, we are not the same. We carry the deep, cellular memory of the first siege. We know that survival is not just a physical act but a stubborn fire in the soul. They can draw their lines on the map, command the roads and checkpoints, but they cannot command the silent, stubborn truth we now embody: that a people who have learned to live in the belly of the beast can never be entirely consumed. The circle may turn, but with each revolution, the spirit is tempered, hardened, and made more resilient. We are the archive of what was and the unwritten chronicle of what will be. I do not know how long we will stay here, in the south of this devastated land that is displaced, lost, and adrift. I do not know if fate will ever allow us to return to Gaza City, to the Jabalia camp, from which we were driven under a hail of fire last May. I pray that this ordeal does not last as long as the previous one, which felt like an eternity, that year and a half. This time, I beg God that our exile will not be so extended.