The Beekeeper of Aleppo

by Christy Lefteri

But when she was sad my world was dark. I didn’t have a choice about this. She was more powerful than I was. She cried like a child, laughed like bells ringing, and her smile was the most beautiful I’ve ever seen. She could argue for hours without ever pausing. Afra loved, she hated, and she inhaled the world like it was a rose. All this was why I loved her more than life.

Afra’s soul was as wide as the fields and desert and sky and sea and river that she painted, and as mysterious.

inside the person you know, there is a person you do not know.

Name—My beautiful boy. Cause of death—This broken world.

Where there are bees there are flowers, and where there are flowers there is new life and hope.

O Allah, keep me alive as long as is good for me, and when death is better for me, take me.

Aleppo is now like the dead body of a loved one, it has no life, no soul, it is full of rotting blood.

I wish I could escape my mind, that I could be free of this world and everything I have known and seen in the last few years.

It’s amazing, the way we love people from the day we are born, the way we hold on, as if we are holding on to life itself.

This was the city of recurring dreams, with no way of waking up: a string of nightmares.

Sometimes we create such powerful illusions, so that we do not get lost in the darkness.