No one truly understands that death doesn’t always arrive with a scream.
Sometimes, it slips quietly into an unfinished sentence, into the trace of a smile that never quite leaves the lips, or into the silent passing beside a wall that no longer holds any color.
That day, sunlight fell just as it always did across the walls of Sayed Al-Shuhada School.
I was not a student there, not a mother of any child inside those classrooms, nor even a teacher.
I was just a passerby, one who walked that same alley every morning, finding comfort in the living sounds of childhood—the dragging of schoolbags, the staccato giggles of little girls, and the repetition of lessons echoing faintly in the air.
But that day, time suddenly stopped.
Not like a broken clock.
Like meanings collapsing in on themselves.
A sound came, not quite an explosion,
not quite a scream, but a silence so heavy it must have traveled a thousand years
just to snuff out everything again.
A voice died inside me.
Not a name, not a face.
But a voice that could have belonged to any of them, any of those little girls,
a voice that believed the world could still be kind;
that learning was a right, not a privilege;
that a child’s smile should never be the ended.
Since that day, all sounds inside me have gone astray.
I no longer know what life sounds like.
Each time I walk past that alley, it feels like even the earth has stopped breathing.
The walls still stand, but something has taken root in them—something like grief, or memory that refuses to be buried.
Sometimes I think, if you truly listen, you might still hear the voice that died inside me.
Not from a throat,
but from bone,
from memory,
from a wound that never quite closed.
The name of that school was ‘Sayed Al-Shuhada’. And how strange, that a name so sacred could witness smiles that were never given the chance to say goodbye.
Tahera K.
09/05/2025
Guest Writer
Girl Museum