There are mornings near Parnell Street when the city has not yet composed itself, and the body wakes before the mind’s consent, moving with the muscle memory of another place. The pavements hold the remnant sheen of night rain, buses idle like held breath, and a single gull stitches a pale seam across a low sky that refuses to brighten quickly.

Only months ago I stood on a different shore, the air dense with dust and the weight of an ending that did not yet call itself exile. I came to Dublin at the hinge of seasons, leaving behind a city burning into smoke and arriving in one perpetually half-washed by rain.

In Gaza, the light once entered the body with certainty; it instructed the day to begin. Here in Dublin, the light pauses on the threshold, as if awaiting permission. It tests the edges of objects before consenting to enter. Between that late-summer departure and the first autumn mornings here, the body has kept two calendars at once: one written in heat and salt, the other in mist and routine.

I walk to the window and the glass stings with cold. Below, the streets look clean and deliberate, their order so steady it almost feels ceremonial. Bins lined up in neat rows, traffic lights keeping calm time, a café window fogging as someone wipes it clean. Even the street-sweeping trucks moving in slow, steady runs up and down the road as if officiating the morning.

I watch them and think about how unfamiliar this kind of order is to me, my own rhythm still holds the tremor of urgency from Gaza. There, my mornings began on streets layered with smoke from burnt wood, the grit of concrete dust in the air, and the faint sweetness of bread baked too early to be purchased. 

In exile, I feel two cities folding through each other, the chill here, the remembered heat there, the clean air and the wind heavy with dust. I was struggling to find language to explain how this felt until I remembered a concept that I learned about long ago – the “contrapuntal.”

Edward Said first introduced the idea of reading works of literature contrapuntally – a way of reading empire and resistance at the same time – in Culture and Imperialism, a collection of essays published in 1993. Using the example of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, Said implored the reader to notice how the calm and order of an English estate depends on an unseen plantation in Antigua. This is a way to keep several histories in mind at once and to see those realities held together at the same time.

Over time in Dublin, I have felt Said’s intellectual proposition migrate into muscle; and I have begun to think of my body as a site of contrapuntal awareness: One rhythm drawn from Gaza’s relentless summers, another from Dublin’s restrained winters, two tempos sounding together in the same nervous system. I have learned to see through rather than into, to read surfaces as one reads history, layered, scarred, and alive beneath their own restraint.

My lungs still half-expect dust when I step outside; they have not yet learned how to trust this clarity. Electricity hums invisibly through every wall, and my hand reaches toward switches with a reflexive economy learned from scarcity. The thumb pauses half a beat before light, negotiating with an old rule. I portion light and warmth as though they were rations, turn off the tap while I soap a dish, fill the kettle only halfway, and save cooled water in bottles for later use. I still store food longer than it needs to be kept.

Even hunger behaves differently here: the body, accustomed to calculating endurance, still flinches before plenty. During the war, our days were organized around shortage,   measured spoonfuls, shared cups, a quiet pact of restraint that made survival a form of arithmetic. We counted sugar by spoons the way we counted breaths; stretched lentils across days; poured oil as if we were pouring time. Those months have ended, yet their logic persists, written into the nerves like a second pulse. When I sit before a full plate now, appetite hesitates, and the stomach mistrusts generosity, the body still bracing for interruption. 

Dublin’s stores are heavy with fruit in every season, aisles gleaming with abundance that exist as rumor under fluorescent lights in Gaza. I walk among this abundance with both wonder, the senses caught between gratitude and suspicion. The world here offers without asking, and my body, remembering another contract with hunger, accepts with caution. The embarrassment of luxury arrives as a blush at the till, as the need to justify a full basket to a stranger, as  the choice of  the smaller loaf when the larger costs the same. 

In Gaza, coffee was a ritual of defiance. During the war, I improvised; placing a strand of steel wool inside a cut tin, striking a spark until the wire glowed orange, then holding the kettle above it with a towel wrapped around my hand. For twenty minutes I guarded that fragile flame, coaxing it to survive long enough for the water to warm, though it never quite boiled. I drank the result anyway: A rough brew of a few coffee beans mixed with roasted chickpeas. The flavor mattered less than the gesture. That memory returns every morning as I switch on the electric kettle.

Instant coffee here is available in every corner shop. It means the body hesitates mid-pour, a blush and an urge to justify the choice to no one; it means measuring out more than I need, then quickly scraping coffee back into the jar, as if plenty were a test I could still fail. Sometimes I stop before pouring, remembering the tin, the scorch marks, the trembling of metal under my grip, the smell of smoke rising through the window during days already heavy with sound. The kettle’s clean hum feels foreign beside that rough persistence. Between the two, the body will not forget that the same act can belong to such different worlds. One cup braces itself against scarcity; one relaxes into ease; both are held by a body that cannot forget. 

The contrapuntal body moves through Dublin with the same awareness that once guarded it through war. When a helicopter crosses the gray sky over the Rotunda Hospital, muscles tighten before the brain intervenes. The spine stiffens for a moment and then lets go. When a plane arcs toward the airport, I still catch myself scanning the angle of its descent, my senses rehearsing an arithmetic of threat. These reflexes do not vanish in new surroundings; they adapt. On quiet mornings along the Liffey, gulls cry above the bridges and their echoes fall into patterns I cannot quite read. Children in Gaza learned the grammar of danger before they learned the grammar of birds, and I was among them. To grow up this way is to inherit a double education – the immediate and the symbolic – and the body carries both, learning to listen for harm and beauty in the same sound.

The longer I live between these two cities, the more their difference acquires the weight of philosophy rather than geography. Said’s contrapuntal reading sought to reveal how one narrative contains another, how empire’s domestic architecture is inseparable from the silenced histories that sustain it. The same story can hold comfort for one reader and evidence of violence for another. I think of that insight now as I trace the parallel melodies within my own being. My movements through Dublin are haunted by the rhythm of Gaza that continues beneath them; my comfort is always accompanied by a second, uneasy line of memory. In the beginning, the contrast hurt like static – each act of ease scraping against the memory of endurance. Warm water startled my hands, and electric light made me flinch before gratitude could form. Even small luxuries – a quiet room, a full shelf — felt undeserved, as though safety itself required apology. 

I have not resolved this double awareness; most days it still feels like something I am learning rather something I understand. What has changed is my sense that it has to be fixed or explained away. The place has not disappeared; some days it is sharp, other days it sits quietly in the background.

Now, when I think of Gaza at night – the blackout stretches, the way silence swelled between distant explosions, the candles burning through their wax too quickly – the memory does not accuse; it accompanies. At home, I fill the kettle and watch the water begin its small shiver before boiling. The steam fogs the glass and renders the outside briefly invisible, as if the world has paused to let memory pass. I let the scene stand without commentary, sensing that this, too, is a kind of contrapuntal reading: the act of perceiving one life through the ghost of another, not to replace or redeem it but to honor the simultaneity of both.

Gaza carved vigilance into my muscles; Dublin has allowed rest. One reminds the body what endurance means and the other teaches how easily meaning can dissolve. Somewhere between them, the tension remains unresolved, and that overlap is where I now live. I am learning that exile is not a single place but an ongoing effort to hold two truths at once – the safety I have now and the danger that has shaped me. I cannot reconcile them and that is OK; I can remain porous to memory without letting it consume the present. My realities in both of these cities exist at once; I no longer try to decide which life is the real one. 

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