Aleena Hassan
Lahore, Pakistan
2025, Senior, Creative Writing

She used to think trees never cried.

Their roots stretched too deep. Their trunks too tall. Their stillness too eternal.

But when the war came for her city — again — and the horizon bled black smoke, she stood by the olive tree in her grandmother’s courtyard, and I swear, she saw it weep. Bark splintered, leaves curled in terror, the sap leaking like a silent scream. That was the day she buried her childhood.

Her name is Yara. She is sixteen years old. She lives — she survives — in Gaza.

People think war sounds like sirens. But war is quieter. War is the sound of a mother murmuring her son’s name in the dark. The creak of a roof seconds before it collapses. The ache in your stomach when the bakery is gone. It’s the sound of nothing — no birds, no school bell, no call to prayer because the mosque is rubble. Just silence. Heavy and cruel.

After the last airstrike, only a corner of her home was left standing. The rest was dust — dust that once held birthdays, books, the smell of cinnamon tea. Her brother Amer was found curled beneath the stairwell. Her father disappeared while trying to bring back water. They never saw him again. Her mother barely speaks now. Her voice is buried beneath the debris of everything she’s lost.

But Yara speaks. Not because she wants to, but because someone has to remember.

When the ceasefire came — a temporary pause, as always — she looked around at the wasteland and felt hollow. There were no windows left to look through, no doors left to open. But something inside her moved. Maybe it was grief. Maybe defiance. She found a rusted spoon in the rubble, bent and blackened. And she began to dig.

Not a grave. A garden.

It sounds foolish, I know. Who grows a garden in the middle of war? But the land remembers who they were before the bombs. She believed that. She knelt in the ashes of their kitchen, where the tiles still held the outline of their old table. There, she dug the first hole. Her grandmother’s spice tin had miraculously survived the collapse. Inside it, hidden beneath the burnt cumin and cardamom, were three lemon seeds.

She pressed them into the ground like prayers.

Every day, she returned. She poured melted ice over the dirt. Whispered stories to the soil. She told it about the orange grove that once bloomed behind their school. About the fig tree that shaded the bakery where she and Amer used to wait for fresh bread. About the jasmine that twirled around their balcony railings. She told the soil everything — because here, the earth is their last living witness.

Days passed. Then weeks. People thought she was mad.

“Water is for drinking,” they said.

“Seeds don’t grow in ruins.”

“There is no future here.”

But one morning, just as the sun split through the cracks in the wall, she saw green. A single shoot — tiny, trembling, stubborn. She fell to her knees and laughed until she cried. That sprout
wasn’t just a plant. It was proof. That the world hadn’t ended. That the soil still remembered how to give. That maybe, so could she.

Word spread. Children came to see the “miracle plant.” A boy offered her a tin of lentils in exchange for a leaf. A girl brought basil seeds wrapped in a candy wrapper. And so it began.

They created a map of green veins across the grey. Mint between broken floorboards. Rocket leaves by the collapsed hospital. Beans trailing up twisted metal rods like they were trellises. They didn’t rebuild homes — they didn’t have bricks — but they rebuilt belief. Every sprout was a rebellion. Every bloom, a reminder that they could bomb their buildings, but not their bond with the land.

They started trading what they grew: thyme for rice, mint for paracetamol, basil for thread and needles. In the absence of a market, they made their own. A green one. Whispered, hidden, sacred.

People say nature is peace. Not there. There, nature is resistance.

The land is not gentle. It is fierce. It rises from fire, drinks blood and tears, and still dares to create beauty. She did not garden for therapy. She gardened because this was their survival. This was how they screamed without making a sound.

They did not rebuild their houses. They rebuilt their relationship with the land.

And in doing so, they began to heal.

I am not saying nature fixed them. Nothing could undo the screams or the empty beds or the drone that still hums at night like a lullaby made of teeth. But in the midst of the ache, the earth kept breathing. Kept reminding them that resilience is a root, not a roar.

When she pressed her ear to the ground, she heard it whisper: You belong to me. Even now. Especially now.

Somewhere in another country, people talk about climate change. Rising sea levels. Melting ice. They hold conferences and speak in numbers. She did not have graphs. She did not have data. She had dirt under her fingernails and a lemon tree that refuses to die.

That was her science. That was her truth.

The world may not see them. May not count their gardens or mourn their dead. But they are here, blooming anyway. Her connection to nature is not a gentle walk in a park. It is a fistful of soil in a war zone. It is blood and basil. Loss and lentils. It is the belief that even in devastation, the earth is still listening — and it still knows how to grow back.

She used to think trees never cried.

Now she knows better.

They do.

And they still stand.

So does she.

I remember the day an old woman brought her a piece of bark wrapped in cloth. She had walked across town to give it to Yara — it was from a date palm that once grew near the seafront. She
had saved it during the last invasion, hiding it in a breadbox. “Plant it,” she said. “If the sea comes back, it will know where it belongs.”

Sometimes, she speaks to the lemon tree. It’s barely taller than her knee, but she calls it Sabr — Patience. She tells it about the UN trucks, the empty classrooms, the silence on Eid. She tells it about her dreams: to become an agricultural scientist, to re-green Gaza, to build vertical gardens on bullet-pierced walls.

She tells it everything, because even if no one else hears her, she knows the soil does.

One day, if she is lucky, she will leave this place. She will walk through airports with lights that don’t flicker and buildings that haven’t been reduced to skeletons. She will eat fruit she didn’t have to trade for, drink water that tastes like rain and not rust. But she will never forget the rubble garden. The first sprout. The way the dirt held her when the world would not.

Let the world debate climate change in conference halls. Let experts give speeches and graphs.

They live climate change.

They live ecological loss, environmental collapse, food insecurity.

Not as theories — as Thursdays.

As mornings without breakfast.

As evenings without light.

And yet she still plants.

So if you ask what nature means to her, she won’t show you a mountain or a forest.

She’ll show you a mint leaf growing through a crack in a shattered floor.

She’ll show you a tree that cried with her.

She’ll show you a sixteen-year-old girl with blistered hands and unyielding hope.

Because there in Gaza, nature is not a luxury.

It is the last living proof that they are still human.

And they are still here.

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