The café by the sea

& when resilience looks like pesto

Al Baqa was a café by the sea in Gaza. It’s where I spent nearly every evening outside of work in the five years I lived in Palestine. It was the place where friends became family, a place to exhale, to feel like the world could be soft again. We’d order mint lemonade, smoke argileh, listen to the waves. It’s where I got locked into round after round of tarneeb and jackaroo. What would start as a table for four at 5:30pm became a table for twelve by 10:30pm. We talked politics and poetry. We co-worked and gossiped. We watched the sun set behind the sea, one of the only things in Gaza that felt infinite.

This morning, moments before I woke up, Al Baqa was targeted in an airstrike. To be clear — not collateral damage, but an intentional, deliberate strike on a beachside café. A massacre. The footage from the aftermath is unwatchable. The grief, unbearable.

I don’t have the words to describe what it means to see a place you loved—a place where togetherness shined so brightly—turned into a mass grave. The very sand your feet once pressed now soaked with blood. Tables you sat around shattered. Maybe someone you knew was there. Maybe someone you don’t know but still loved, because that’s how Gaza is—it makes everyone feel like family. I like to describe Gaza as a very big small town.

When we talk about genocide, it’s easy to collapse into abstraction. Numbers. Headlines. Anonymous victims. Charred, unrecognizable bodies. But this wasn’t abstract for me. It was my Al Baqa. My memory, my life, my chosen home.

And it isn’t just grief. It’s rage. Rage at the world that allows this to happen again and again. Rage at the silence from people who look away. Rage that this horror keeps escalating and the world debates legitimacy while we bury children. Rage that there is nowhere in Gaza—not even a beachside café—safe from obliteration.

I felt numb today. I managed to get a little work done. I answered some emails. But I didn’t eat all day. Exactly a year ago, I experienced a nervous system breakdown spurred by a lost appetite and a week of not eating. Today’s appetite loss felt eerily similar. Last night, I went to bed with an uneasy feeling in my body as I approached the year anniversary of my unraveling. And then, moments after waking, a direct hit to the heart.

As a result of my breakdown, I started taking antidepressant medication to dull the ache of existence while my world in Gaza ends again and again. The medication makes me forgetful — I lose track of details and take a few moments longer than usual to recall certain words.

And yet—what choice is there but to keep remembering? I remember the sound of the Arabic version of happy birthday blaring over the speakers at least three times a night at Al Baqa. I remember the time we surprised Mahmoud with a celebration for his engagement. I remember the intense tarneeb tournament I got sucked into, and the gaggle of friends behind me backseat driving my moves. I remember the night it suddenly downpoured — the sound of rain pelting Al Baqa’s tin roof too loud to talk over. I remember my last evening in Gaza, when the café staff gifted me with an honorary Al Baqa hat and sweatshirt worn by the waiters. “Send us a picture of you wearing it in New York!” I remember the sea, steady and blue, watching it all.

What was lost at Al Baqa wasn’t solely human life. It was ordinary joy. It was the right to sit with friends at the end of the day and feel human. To sit down and savor Gaza’s delicious seafood. It was beauty. Tenderness. The exact things we are told are not political.

I decided to not give in to my lost appetite today. After rooting around in my pantry and fridge, I made a pesto out of pistachios, parsley, dill, and Palestinian olive oil. After swallowing my 365th dose of antidepressants, I ate my earthy, herbaceous pasta slowly. I let myself savor the flavors. I even let myself take pride in my spontaneous creation. While I ate, I glanced at the framed print on my wall that reads Gaza will rise, and somewhere between the satisfaction of a hearty meal and the shards of my shattered heart, I felt certainty that it will.

Gaza has always made beauty out of rubble. Joy out of scarcity. And even now, in mourning, I write to keep the memory alive—not just of the devastation, but of the life that existed before and will rise after it.

A dreamy afternoon at Al Baqa.

If you’re reading this, I ask only this: bear witness. Don’t look away. Let this memory live in you, too. The bare minimum we owe the people of Gaza is to see them, to remember them, to refuse to let their lives be reduced to debris and headlines.

To Gaza, to Al Baqa, to every soul lost—I remember you.