The Soft Thud of a Folded Home: The Moment I Walked Away, Leaving Myself Behind
By Malak Radwan
The act of unmaking a home is a violence done to the soul. Last week, I performed this violence upon myself. I took apart my furniture, piece by piece, each unscrewed bolt and disjoined plank, feeling like a dissolution of my own skeleton. I folded my life into neat, manageable squares of cloth, a pathetic geometry of reduction. With every drop of sweat and every short, ragged breath, I trembled; not from exertion, but from the sheer enormity of the subtraction. The house itself grew heavy with a silence that was not peace, but accusation. These walls, which had once held the fragile architecture of my laughter, the blueprints of my plans, the quiet hum of late nights spent working, now stood as mute witnesses to their own abandonment. Room by room, I emptied what I had built, painted, and cared for, until the echo of my footsteps was the only thing that remained, a ghost already haunting the space it was about to leave.
Then came the hollow, metallic knell of the displacement clock. We waited for days, a congregation of the stateless, hoping for the miracle of a vehicle. When they came, they demanded a king’s ransom for a journey that was once a mundane commute; a twenty-minute passage for ten shekels. It was an exodus priced in gold, a cost most could not fathom, let alone afford. And so, the road transformed. The same tarmac that, in a fleeting January of 2025, had witnessed a river of returning feet, now bore a tide of retreat.
I remember that January walk. After a year and a half of exile, a ceasefire was announced, a fragile thread of hope. People walked back to Gaza City, seven kilometers to the south, their feet bare against the earth, their hearts too full of the prospect of home to feel the ache of the distance. The road then was a conduit of joy; its very dust seemed blessed. Today, that same road is a scar across the land, a testament to a reverse pilgrimage. It witnesses not homecoming, but exile. Not joy, but a crushing weight of depression and heartbreak. Our journey south took eight hours, a crawl through a nightmare of congestion and despair. The road measures distance in kilometers, but the soul measures it in the erosion of hope.
How does a person fit a home into a single bag? It is an impossible arithmetic. And for those who have solved it, who have distilled their existence into a sack upon their back, what awaits? They possess no money, no tent, no plot of earth upon which to pitch a fleeting shelter. Their destination is not a camp, but a street. Their ceiling will be the indifferent sky; their bed, the unyielding concrete.
I do not know if my eyes will ever again hold the shape of my house. This is the deepest cut of the wound: the uncertainty. And if, by some miracle of fate, I am permitted to return, what then? After a second abandonment, will those walls still recognize me? Will the roof consent to shelter a tenant so easily evicted, a spirit so thoroughly broken? Or will the key turn in the lock to reveal a stranger’s house, its memory of me scrubbed clean by the dust of neglect?
I hate the world. I hate its polished silence, its distant, clinical gaze. I hate that it watches this unraveling from afar, as if observing some fascinating, tragic play upon a stage, and then changes the channel. This grief is not a natural disaster; it is man-made, authored by indifference and delivered by silence. And in that vast, global quiet, the only sound is the echo of our own unmaking, the soft, terrible thud of a home being folded away, and the endless, weary tread of feet upon a road that leads nowhere.
