A date that some people, like me, remember with heartache, joy, hope, grief and, inevitably, tears.

The Arab Spring.
What many now call the bloody spring.

People don’t always understand what that Spring meant to people like me, and to so many others, those of us raised by refugee parents, by political and social activists who taught us to believe in change. Who raised us to work for a better world. To resist. To persist. To stand against oppression and tyranny. Against regimes that worked against us, not for us.

For us, it was a breath of fresh air.
A rupture of possibility.
A reclaiming of power, the power of the people, the power of a generation shaped by inherited stories of occupation, struggle and survival.

I miss that hope.
I miss the unity, the shared knowing that their success is ours; that our liberation was bound to each other

We learned together.
Nonviolent resistance, both from books and from the streets.
Knowledge passed hand to hand, post to post, act of care to act of care.

Yes, the outcomes were not what we hoped for.
Yes, the cost was devastating.

But if I could go back in time, I would not choose differently.
To us, it was a Spring.

What remains are friendships that have lasted for years, with people I met only three or four times in person. What binds us is deeper than frequency: a collective history we wrote together, a collective hope, a collective heartbreak, music we carried together…A collective memory…

When we were exhausted, we shared a song by Hamza Namira, “Dream with Me,” to remember why we were there.
To remember that even when nights feel endless, dreaming itself is an act of resistance.

Some seasons don’t end.
They root.

Dream with me of a tomorrow that is on its way.
And if it does not arrive on its own, we will bring it ourselves.

We begin by trying
to place one step on the road ahead,
trusting that many footsteps together can shape a path to our dream.

No matter how many times we fall.
We will rise again.

We push forward, we defy the clouds.
Even when the night feels a thousand days long.
Still, we choose to dream.

Dream with me, my friend.
Let our steps bend the road ahead.
My innocent dream matters to me, whatever it is

It alone stays beside us….No matter how far the road extends,
even if we lose our way, my friend
Our meeting will find us again and reunite us

With our dream.

We just need to keep dreaming….