Back to School

In ten days, a new school year will begin.

I will move from middle school to high school. I will return to my school—but the word return no longer means what it once did.

I will return to a school without walls. 🏫💔

I remember when school meant my friends’ laughter, whispered conversations between lessons, and the small worries we thought were the biggest things in our lives. We never knew those ordinary days were something precious.

Now, many of those faces are gone.

Friends who were part of my childhood are no longer there. Teachers who taught me are gone too. Some people become part of our hearts so quietly that we only understand their value when their absence becomes permanent. 🕊️

So I will enter high school carrying something no schoolbag can show: a deep grief for those I have lost, and a childhood that was interrupted before it had the chance to grow.

And even the smallest details of returning to school have become painful reminders of what has changed.

I will not have new clothes. I will wear the same clothes I have worn to school for the past year.

I will not have a new schoolbag. No stationery. No textbooks. 📚

To someone living an ordinary life, these may seem like small things. Here, they have become evidence of how much our lives have changed. Even the beginning of a school year—which should be filled with excitement, new friendships and hope—now carries the weight of everything we have lost.

And still, I will go.

Not because the pain has disappeared, and not because the road has become easier.

I will go because sometimes a person holds onto a dream the way someone drowning holds onto the last piece of wood in the sea. 🌊

My dream is to become a doctor. 🩺

One day, I want to care for children who survived this genocide. I want to see something other than fear in their eyes. I want to help them recover a small piece of the life that was taken from them.

And I want to return to my mother and father one day carrying something that resembles joy—to tell them that everything we endured was not the end of our story. ❤️

I do not have a complete school. I do not have a new uniform, a new bag, or books. I do not even have the friends I wished to begin high school beside.

But I still have a dream.

And somehow, despite everything, that dream is still alive. 🌱

I will return to a school without walls, carrying the names of those who are gone in my heart, and a dream much bigger than the ruins around me:

to become a doctor—and to prove that war may destroy a school, but it must never be allowed to destroy a child’s future. 🕊️📚🩺