by Leila Barghouty
I woke up this morning, and I stared at the ceiling. I wasn’t afraid of it. I didn’t think it might be the last thing I ever saw, that I might wake up in a pile of rubble, lungs filled with the pulverized powder that was once my home. My ears didn’t think to listen for an airstrike. The thought didn’t cross my mind because I won the lottery.
I live here.
I won the lottery a few weeks ago, when my job told me they didn’t need me anymore. It was decided that my position, along with hundreds of my colleagues’, was one that did “not need to be replaced.” I’d spent the preceding weekend, along with hundreds of my colleagues, combing through imagery of slain civilian bodies. Women, children, and the tiniest babies. It’s part of the job. But this time, many of the bodies looked like mine: frizzy brown curls that covered dark, tired eyes. Wrinkled and faded t-shirts draped over wintering skin slowly losing its summer warmth. Others didn’t look so familiar: half-empty cases that were once people, covered in a thick layer of gray dust. Sections of flesh completely missing. I sat comfortably on a cushioned desk chair as I watched, burying my face into my clammy hands. Every appendage accounted for, though, because I won the lottery.
I won the lottery earlier this month, too, when my car broke down. I drove ten thousand miles in just 4 months — enough to drive the length of Gaza 400 times. I did it for fun. The car is old and the paint is sticky with sap from the tree that I park it under. The door handles are decorated with a faint crosshatch, little linear ghosts of over-excitement left by eager hands before a journey. I drove ten thousand miles through beautiful country roads this summer — not a single one driven to escape certain death. Someone already did that for me, because I won the lottery.
I won the lottery when I lost my passport. It’s somewhere, I know, but I’ve done so much driving lately I’m just not sure where I left it. Anyway, I have two. Two different countries have me registered in their catalog of citizens. Two countries have vouched for my ability to travel. Two countries have confirmed I am who I say I am. I lost my passport because in my daily life, no one needs proof of who I am. I won the lottery.
I won the lottery last year when my muscles and bones felt the cloying ache of heartbreak. It lingers, still, like a sweet mourning, in the smell of fallen pine needles in frozen mud. I feel a new jolt of it when I realize that I’m starting to forget the exact tenor of a voice or the slope of a sun-burnt cheek. But it’s a privileged grief: a loss, but a living one. In all its pain, it’s still the sorrow of absolute freedom, of consequences preceded wholly by choice, because I won the lottery.
But I suppose I actually won the lottery when we buried my brother. His death was quiet and slow. His soul left his young body intact, in one singular piece. Ten fingers and ten toes went into the ground, still attached to the body that grew them. It’s a gift to be buried with all your pieces still in your possession. I didn’t realize it then, because I won the lottery.
No, of course I won the lottery when I was born. It was in a hospital. The lights were on the whole time. No one had any reason to cut them. The thought that the labor room might fold into rubble didn’t cross my parents’ mind. Who would cut power to a hospital?
I realized how often I’ve won the lottery only recently. I saw a little girl who looked like me. We met while posed in the same position, wearing almost the same outfits. Scrolling through videos from an Israeli airstrike on Gaza that day from my bed, I noticed her cotton t-shirt as she lay on her back. A pink tank top underneath had been ripped away by doctors and lay in a frayed bunch at her side. Her brown curls were tied by a faded gray elastic, just like mine. Her mother urgently pushed fly-aways off her daughter’s face, with the same force that mine still does when she’s worried I look too messy to be in public.
Then, I noticed the little girl’s stillness. As her mother wailed above her, the doctor pulled out a marker. The only way to make sure the dead are correctly identified is to write their names directly on the bodies they’ve left behind. They aren’t lucky enough to be identified by two passports, like I would. The raw familiar guilt of winning the lottery spread over every inch of me. This little girl won’t experience the excruciating joy of heartbreak. Or the freedom of aimless travel. She won’t get to see her brother buried whole.
On her little chest, the doctor writes my name, but the letters look different without the privilege I wear mine with. The same letters in the same order. But hers don’t win the prize of being allowed to keep living. Because she didn’t win the lottery.
Leila Barghouty is a writer based in New York. She has written for print and screen, primarily focusing on civil and human rights issues. She is a graduate of the University of Michigan and Stanford University.