I’m From The Country Of The Thousand Wounds

Residents prepare mass graves earlier this week for Syrian people who died in Sarmada, Idlib province, following the earthquake. Photograph: Emily Garthwaite/The New York Times

The digital well-being widget on my mobile tells me I am spending too much time looking at the screen and that I have only a few more minutes to waste. I dismiss the notification with my shaking finger and keep scrolling, keep falling.

Rubble, stones, ashy faces, shouts of terror and sobs echoed over and over. Is this really happening? It’s not the first time my social media feed has turned into a disaster zone, but why does this one feel different?

Lists of names, survivors and dead, separated families, items needed, phone numbers of people who own heavy equipment and excavators, and locations of desperate voices under the ground. The word earthquake shakes my heart. Images and videos of people standing in front of collapsed buildings calling out to their loved ones before they run out of oxygen and hope. Others knew their families didn’t make it but refused to leave without a corpse.

Many didn’t have the luxury of being on the scene to scream for their loved ones or dig the ground with their bare hands looking for them. They were exiled outside Syria and not allowed to return, whether afraid of the Syrian regime’s arbitrary persecution or because of asylum-seeking laws that prevent refugees from returning to the country from which they escaped in the first place. Instead, those stranded people were screaming on social media, posting details about their loved ones’ locations, with their pictures when they looked happy and normal and not under a collapsed building, helplessly pleading for anyone to go to look and help.

My inbox is flooding with reporters asking me to go live on their media channels to comment on the situation. They are fast and sharp, and professional. Not one asks if my people are dead or wish to be. I am a news source, again. My Syria is back in the headlines after I accepted how the world had let us down and moved on despite our ongoing tragedy, which has been going on for 12 years. We are trending one more time in the hashtags, and our miserable faces are in fundraising campaigns. This is not déjà vu.

My phone abruptly shuts down the stream of death with the power I gave to the well-being widget a few months back. I reached the daily limit I set for myself when I was trying to be normal and productive. I change the settings, add…