Diaspora Means Carrying the Corpses Too

A Doctor’s Visit, a Necklace, and the Conversations That Never End

I went to the doctor yesterday. Just a routine check-up, the kind where they ask the same questions about diet and sleep, where they take your weight and blood pressure, where they scribble notes without ever really looking at you. I thought, for a moment, about telling them the truth. That my sleep has been a string of broken hours and my chest feels heavy in ways I cannot describe, that for twenty-one months now I have been waking up to the same unbearable headlines, to images of my people under rubble, to numbers that climb without end, and that maybe there should be a chart for how grief settles into the body like an illness of its own.

But I kept quiet, tracing the outline of my necklace as I waited. It is silver, small enough to rest over my heart, shaped like the land they have tried to erase.

The woman beside me noticed it almost immediately. She was older, white, dressed the way people here dress when they believe comfort is proof of peace, her expression polite but already carrying the weight of the question she was about to ask. She looked at my necklace, then at me, and asked if I was Israeli.

It is strange how often that question finds me, how people have been taught to look at the map of my home and mistake it for the occupier’s. The propaganda has done its work so thoroughly that even the shape of Palestine is now contested, even our geography belongs to someone else’s narrative.

I told her I am Palestinian. I told her this necklace carries more than the borders they have redrawn; it holds the outline of the villages erased in 1948, the refugee camps where children carry keys to homes they have never seen, the olive groves uprooted by settlers, the stories my grandparents told me about the land before the soldiers came. It holds both the theft and the memory, both the dispossession and the refusal to forget.

She smiled in that careful, practiced way people do when they are about to say something they believe is kind, even if it is wrapped in erasure. She told me she wants peace. She said she feels for both sides. She mentioned that she is Christian, married to a Jewish man, that they live here in Ann Arbor, that they believe in harmony, though her idea of harmony was already unraveling in front of me.

These conversations find us everywhere. They follow us into classrooms, into grocery store lines, into sterile waiting rooms like this one, turning ordinary spaces into trials of identity, where I am expected to explain my grief, to justify my existence, to translate loss into language that will not offend.

I asked her what peace looks like when one side has drones and snipers and the other pulls their children’s bodies from beneath collapsed buildings. I asked her how peace can be spoken of while entire families are buried alive, while doctors amputate limbs in hospital hallways without anesthesia, while the soil is so saturated with blood that new graves are dug above old ones.

She told me it is complicated, the same phrase I have heard in every corner of the diaspora, in coffee shops, in airports, in offices where my name is both a curiosity and a provocation. She mentioned human shields, Hamas, the recycled talking points that dehumanize my people even as we speak. She sat beside me, speaking as if I wasn’t Palestinian, as if my existence could be split apart from the headlines, as if I was not carrying every funeral, every demolished home, every disappeared child, folded quietly into my chest.

I tried, as I always do, to pull her closer to the truth, though I have learned that some people have built entire worlds out of avoidance. I told her about the screams beneath the rubble, the fathers clawing through debris with bare hands, the mothers wrapping what is left of their children in shrouds far too small. I told her grief is not abstract for us—it is bone deep, carried across oceans, carved into the language we speak, stitched into the spaces we inhabit far from home.

She nodded, but not in understanding. It was the nod people give when they want to seem reasonable, when they want to hold on to their comfort while entertaining your sorrow as something distant, something they can dip into for a moment and then retreat from.

The conversation shifted the way they always do, stretching from Gaza to Iran, from occupation to empire. She told me we need to defend our land, the words slipping out so casually, as though their meaning had not been warped by decades of propaganda.

I asked her which land. Iran is not attacking America. Iran is surviving under the weight of sanctions and threats, responding to Israeli airstrikes that barely register as news here. But I understood her meaning. Empire has collapsed the distance between their violence and our silence, convincing people that American safety is tied to Palestinian erasure, that Israeli bombs dropped on Tehran somehow keep Ann Arbor secure, that their peace requires our destruction.

The doctor called my name. They took my blood pressure, told me it was high, probably stress. I smiled because there was nothing else to do. They do not have a diagnosis for what happens to the body when exile becomes permanent, when every conversation feels like a referendum on your right to exist, when every interaction carries the possibility of being asked to explain your humanity.

I left the office the same way I arrived, the outline of Palestine cool against my chest, the knowledge that even in the quiet spaces, even here, far from Rafah, far from Nuseirat, far from the refugee camps in Lebanon, we carry the grief with us.

Diaspora is not distance. It is the weight of memory stretched across borders, it is the sound of conversations like this one playing out in grocery stores and classrooms and waiting rooms, it is the ache that settles behind your ribs when people smile at you and still manage to excuse the slaughter of your people in the same breath.

There is a sickness here, but it is not one they can test for. It is the sickness of propaganda, of borders folded into each other, of people who believe that peace means Palestinians must die quietly, that genocide can be complicated, that occupation is a matter of opinion.

I stepped outside into the June heat, the weight of my necklace resting steady against my chest, the ache of exile carried in every step. I thought about how often they redraw the maps, how they rename the cities, how they erase the borders in language but never in memory.

The land remains. The people endure. And no matter how far they scatter us, no matter how many conversations they turn into trials, we carry the outline of home with us, carved into our bodies, stitched into our words, refusing to vanish.

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