On the river, workers were closing down a boat café, stacking chairs and locking them to the edge. My grandfather had a chair like that one, I thought. A white chair with a half-circle on the back, different from all the others men had outside their houses – often leftovers from street bachelor parties. Most houses in my neighbourhood in Gaza had a chair outside, sometimes surrounded by others when people visited, but always singular by the morning.

I was eight when I sat on a grey cement stone beside my grandfather’s white chair on a rain washed night. My parents were travelling, and I had spent a month at their house. I couldn’t sleep, so I stayed up with him, his company filled with silence except when he sent me upstairs to bring fresh tea. I held a wooden stick fallen from the fig tree above us and attached it to a small car from my brother’s toys, moving it back and forth, tracing shapes.

“I used to be a taxi driver,” he said, seemingly out of nowhere. “Unlike today, there were barely any cars around here, and mine wasn’t even a hire.”

I kept moving the little car, this time more steadily.

“Who is sitting in your little car, and where are they going?” he smiled.

I focused on the car, carefully adjusting the stick so it wouldn’t flip now that Sido had decided to give it passengers.

It was the age of the recurring car crash dream, where I would be driving, barely reaching the brakes, then losing control. My small car suddenly carried a reassuring weight it didn’t have in those dreams..

“Mama and Baba,” I answered. “And you,” I added. “But you’re not driving it.”

“And what stories are they telling you?”

“They tell me they miss me like I miss them, and about the gifts they got me, and the flying.”

“And what am I doing?”

“You’re just there, Sido.”

He told me stories about the people he drove – women in labour, injured people from protests, nights held at checkpoints, the time he hid a boy in the trunk because the military was looking for him and his older brother, and of course, ordinary people carrying ordinary griefs.

I believe that night I got more words out of Sido than I ever did. For most of my childhood, I thought that all his life, he sat on that chair outside his house, drinking mint tea or cracking dried salted watermelon seeds. I could see him moving people across our city, making what he could, which was never enough for the house to become a multi-storey home – though that was more my grandmother’s doing than his.

In 2011, Sido left us very slowly, between hospitals and long nights in his bedroom. His absence came in intervals - stretched and painful, filled with stories we had never heard before and an anger that rarely showed when he was fully with us. He was the first absence I experienced. It was a time when our men got old enough for us to recognise their absence by their empty chairs. When our men got old enough to park their taxis, plant cherished vegetable gardens and raise grandchildren.

In the absence of concrete geography and linearity, my brain traces all the white chairs across the alleys and roads. It moves in a flurry at our house’s doorstep, then at Sido’s, at our neighbour’s, at my uncle’s house around the corner. There is no longer a world where revisitations are possible. We now have to carve out those geographies, to make space for memory, to then grieve.

Could one really grieve in total absence of geography? I don’t know.

I missed Sido. I was a bit disturbed by how long I had not thought about him or even since I’ve thought of any loss that preceded the past two and half years. I felt guilt mixed with relief, like I’d returned a piece of me through that night, but I did not know where to place it in the distortion of it all.

My phone screen lit when a man appeared from inside the boat and mumbled a few French words.

“...madam?” is all I could dissect at first. Then I realised he was telling me to step back so they could close the boarding tramp to avoid trespassers. I waved and turned around.

I stopped at a late-night Monop’ to buy some fruit for breakfast. I was carrying a book someone had sent me years ago to review. I had originally tucked two five-euro notes between its pages, and when I opened it, a small piece of paper slipped to the floor. It read: “I will miss you, because I will forget you this summer term. Love from V.”

I placed the note back inside, paid for my kiwis and oranges, and stepped outside. It took me a moment to remember what I had forgotten. It was a letter one of the children had written for me a few summers ago - perhaps the most honest and sincere thing anyone had ever said to me. I took the long way back to the flat, smiling at the memory of V’s face from that summer we spent mostly in isolation during Covid – between parks and Arabic lessons.

I reached for my phone to take a picture of the note, afraid of losing it again. A message lit up my screen: “I just don’t want to speak to anyone now. I am ok. I love you.”

By then, the lights of the Eiffel Tower were off, and the chairs at the terrace cafés were stacked into quiet, parallel towers. The city had folded into itself. On my walk back, I did what I had done every night for the past three weeks – repeating, in small loops, the little French I had learned so far.

Demain, je passerai la journée au soleil avec mes amis.

Tomorrow, we will search for the sun.

Tomorrow, I will remember you again.

And sometimes, I won’t.