The girl sits with her cheek resting against a silent pain called time, and her keffiyeh carries the weight of stories that never found a way into the world. She stares at the hourglass before her, at that symbol that exposes how time rushes by uselessly, as if each falling grain of sand pulls with it another year she has lived behind bars, waiting for a war to end… only for another war to begin, then end… only to give birth to a new war, until her life became a closed circle with no door except patience.
The sand slips away just as her childhood slips away, as though she sees in its descent the names of those who left, the homes that turned to dust, the laughter swallowed by smoke. And on her cheek, the blood is not only a wound, but a witness to years that stretched beyond her strength, and to a waiting that exhausted the heart and bore no peace.
And yet, time runs; it does not look back at her. It passes by as if she were a fixed shadow in a world that moves. It leaves her before a hidden question: what could life have been if her dreams had not been erased by every war, if she had been given a single chance to live outside the circle, for the sand to hold a meaning other than waiting?
Stolen time behind bars
oil on canvas
part of hourglass project