In the rubble of a nameless street, a girl ties her hair with wire and counts the syllables of silence between missiles. She remembers a house — not the shape of its walls, but the smell of her mother’s bread, and the way shadows leaned gently at sunset. Each night, her father recites verses the world forgot, as if prayer could rebuild a roof. A boy plants a paper flag in the sand, not to claim the land, but to say: I was here. I mattered. They call this a battlefield. But it is a classroom where dust is the chalk, and grief teaches the alphabet of survival. Somewhere, across oceans, a leader signs his name on a shipment of thunder, and they call it defense. But under the scorched fig tree, a widow hums her husband’s name into the roots, so he will rise again as blossom. This is not the end. Hope does not knock. It grows — slow, stubborn, uninvited — in the cracks of everything. Where the olive tree waits, so does she.