My name is Noura Riyami. I live in Los Angeles, California, but my origins lie in Egypt and Oman, born and raised. James Baldwin talks about finding others in your pain, resonating across skin border. Sharing, a surpassing, a passing through, a passing in between skin border. I ask James, what do I do if it's scarier to share? To betray oneself, to betray as oneself, to have the betrayed escape skin border, lurking, hibernating, ready to surge, ready to haunt, ready to devour. 

Regardless, I share, not for me, but for her. This is a story of a friend lost in Gaza. Her name, Jude. October 7th, 2023, escalation in Gaza. 

I send her a text she responds a day or two later as she and her family prepare to evacuate their home in Ghaziz city to seek refuge south, Um Kameil Khan Yunis, or Rafah, with hopes of crossing the border to Egypt. October 26, 2023, I send her a text, text undelivered, I begin to worry, silence. October 27, 2023, 

I send her a text, text undelivered, I am worried, I beg for a response, silence. That day, Ghaziz Health Ministry releases a list of names of 6 ,747 Palestinians killed today, not listing the names of 281 Palestinians whose bodies couldn't be identified or the 1,500 missing trapped under rubble. October 28, 2023, I send her another text, text undelivered. I beg for a response. 

Silence. She's gone missing. I start going through the list, sifting through 200 pages, name, age, gender, an ID number of each victim, her name not on the list, a glimpse of hope. November 23rd, 2023, I send her another text, text undelivered, I beg for a response, silence, and so I begin to grieve. December 15th, 2023, news confirmed, Jude passed with her father on November 23rd, 2023. 

In that moment, she ceased to exist. She was 24 years old. Now a little less than a year later, the immensity of this fact obliterates me. The quote-unquote war, this variously named war that still tears us apart, began, for me, on that date. 

Grieving too began its long mercurial transformative work, from utter denial to unleashed rage, carnage, from emotional numbness to bouts of self -destruction and depression, grieving reshaped me from the inside out. So much has happened since, but it was right after the paralysis of my first contact with horror that I chose to craft her box. I crafted this box for her when my missing her became physically unbearable. I did not craft her box to avoid pain, just the opposite. It reminded me of it. I crafted her box as I grieved with others. It was the only way I knew to keep her alive. I wanted to craft through and with pain, and to painfully embrace it, to give it back at beating heart, which through her memory still palpitates. Jude's box is political. It does not beg for commiseration. 

It is not subject to the market of pity. It does not try to take away from the multiple voices and stories that already exist, quite the opposite. More so, in an effort to oppose a discourse of war, that gives preference to colonial and state violence, and the violence of the businessmen of the globalized world, Jude's box implicates pain. The unjustifiable suffering of the eviscerated body, carnage, in order to participate in the configuration of what can be seen, what can be said and what can be thought in the fight for liberation. This is a last note to the friend I lost in Gaza. If it is any consolation, to me, you will never cease to exist. To me, you are never lost.