Emerging perspectives

More than a decade ago, I sat in the backseat of a taxi leaving Damascus. It was early morning. The air felt off, thin and unsettled. The city, still asleep, looked tired. Sad. The driver and I didn’t talk much.

The decision to leave had come quickly, maybe too quickly. We told ourselves it was temporary. A month or two, we said.

A view of downtown Damascus, Syria.

By then, the regime was bombing more neighbourhoods, closer ones. We kept folding inward, like retreating from a fire that would not stop burning.

We stayed with relatives. That, too, was exhausting, in a way that matched the war around us. So we left. No goodbyes. No last looks. Just the smooth hum of a car on an empty road.

Years later, the fall of Al Assad struck like a storm we had long feared – sudden, ruthless and hauntingly unreal.

By then, I had built a life elsewhere, in a place that never stopped reminding me I didn’t belong. And still, going back felt harder than leaving ever did.

How could that be? How could returning to the place you once called home be harder than walking away from it?

Now, a naturalised citizen, the choice is mine. That’s what marks the difference. For millions, the decision was never theirs to make.

We landed in Cairo. Not for good, just for now, though no one said it that way. We got off the plane into a wall of heat. The kind that doesn’t just surround you, but settles on your skin and stays.

Outside, the city buzzed relentlessly. Horns blared, people shouted and engines roared without a moment’s rest.

We sat in the back of a taxi, not speaking, sweating through our clothes. No one opened a window.

We rented a furnished apartment with fake leather couches and a washing machine that shook like it might tip over. The balcony looked out onto another building. Nothing moved. The sun was too bright, always. The cockroaches came at night. Big ones, slow and visible. We didn’t talk about them. We just learned to turn the lights on fast, to stomp when necessary.

School started. I memorised new streets. We stayed long enough to forget that we were still waiting.

Two years passed like that, not quickly, not slowly. Just days piling on top of days. Ramadan, summer, another school year. I learned how to answer questions in Arabic with an accent that marked me as not quite local. We weren’t running anymore, but we weren’t settled either. Just surviving in a waiting room that felt endless.

I learned how to answer questions in Arabic with an accent that marked me as not quite local. We weren’t running anymore, but we weren’t settled either. Just surviving in a waiting room that felt endless.

Then came the second goodbye. The revolution had returned, loud this time, unstable in a different way. Tanks rolled and voices shouted, but what truly undid us was silent: expired visas, refused renewals, a bureaucratic cage closing quietly around us. Our legal status had collapsed and, with it, the illusion that we could wait this out.

This time, it wasn’t all of us. Just me and my brother. We had already left the extended family behind in Damascus – the cousins, the uncles, the noise of a full house. Now we were leaving the close one, too. The core. Just the five of us at the table, now reduced to two. The part that still felt like home, even when everything else didn’t. The dinners, the glances, the private jokes that still made it feel like home.

Leaving Egypt wasn’t clean. The idea of a boat, of Europe, felt absurd, a plan with no shape, no edges. We resisted. We clung to routines: grocery runs, schoolwork, dinners eaten without appetite. We told ourselves it wasn’t time yet. But the truth sat there, in our passports, in the lines outside the immigration office, in the silence after the phone calls. Our residency had expired. The country had closed its doors without ever saying so.

This goodbye was different. It wasn’t rushed or numb. It lingered. It pressed on the chest. We were old enough now to know what it meant – to leave not just a place, but the people who had held the place together.

We left. Not all at once, not with certainty. Just an evening, a taxi, and backpacks too big for our bodies, pulling us off balance, hanging awkwardly as we cast one last, long glance from the taxi window. And then the road again.

The boat changed everything. Something slipped away between the waves and the salt. A quiet unravelling. The person who stepped off wasn’t quite the same as the one who’d stepped on.

The boat changed everything. Something slipped away between the waves and the salt. A quiet unravelling. The person who stepped off wasn’t quite the same as the one who’d stepped on. What came after wasn’t a return, but a quiet beginning of something unfamiliar.

Documents piled up. Endless papers, waiting rooms heavy with quiet desperation, the sharp call of a number on a screen. Waiting, hoping, enduring. Then asylum status arrived. The 1951 Convention Travel Document, a new ID number. We celebrated. A strange kind of joy, more relief than triumph, more survival than arrival.

Then came the lessons. Not just language, but how to pronounce your own name in a way they’d understand. How to sit still in integration courses without vanishing.

Then came the lessons. Not just language, but how to pronounce your own name in a way they’d understand. How to sit still in integration courses without vanishing. How to nod politely when they told you what freedom meant. School followed. Then university. Life went on, quietly, steadily. And somehow, ten years passed.

It’s been ten years since I last spoke to a cousin or an aunt. My grandparents have died since then. No goodbyes, no graves I could reach, no calls to soften the news. Family dissolved like smoke slipping through a cracked window, scattered across borders, melting away into silence or swallowed by war. Yet here I am called “well integrated”, as if knowing the right answers ever meant belonging.

Citizen, at last. And home, finally freed from the grip of tyranny. Recognition here. Liberation there. Two freedoms, too long delayed.

I watch the celebrations from a screen, alone. Faces I no longer know, waving flags I still fold quietly in the back of my mind. Fireworks stutter in low resolution. The chants arrive a few seconds too late.

And still I dare to hope. For the first time in a long time.

But hope, like memory, comes carefully. It doesn’t burst in. It lingers at the threshold, knocks softly and waits to see if there’s room. I want to say yes. I want to believe the door I closed over a decade ago might still open, that something of me is still waiting on the other side.

But I’m no longer sure which side that is.

I want to go back. Some days, I ache for it. The way jasmine clung to the night air, the call of a voice that once knew how to say my name without hesitation. But what’s left there for me? The streets I knew have collapsed into memory. The people scattered. The furniture sold or shelled. There’s no house, no job, no soft landing.

And here, here, I’ve built something. Slowly, stubbornly. A life held together by language learned late, by routines practiced into permanence. Friendships formed from the wreckage. Papers once begged for, now folded in my wallet. To give it up would be to undo a decade. But to stay is to live slightly beside myself. I long for the familiar, and belong to neither place. Somewhere in between, I carry the weight of both.

A. Assaf

Author

A. Assaf has studied linguistics, political science, and global affairs, with a broad academic interest in language, identity, and power. He has lived in Syria, Egypt, Austria, and the United States, experiences that continue to shape his perspective.