When I was to finally stand by the side of the meandering road I had been promised, a narrow sun-beaten road of asphalt leading to a hidden cemetery far and high into the messy grey rocks and the silent pine trees of a rugged hillside, I would contemplate one of the many tragedies there are to being a refugee. Gazing over the last reliefs of Akkar as they came crashing down in dry greens and browns onto a vast expanse of flatland, squinting as I would try and make out that unsure line across this flatland, where Lebanon became Syria over the slow waters of the river al-Kabir, I would know for certain I was never going to exist outside of our civil war.

Never mind the bloody red and the sweet-sour of the Aarsal cherries imported into our souks and local shops, how they had never failed to go from one small hand to the next in our schoolyards… Never mind the great family caravans of Eid al-Adha, absolutely full of tea but cheerful still, unfaltering until each and every single neighbor was wished, Eid mubarak… And never mind the many outstanding weddings we had placed into circles of chairs, with reserved brides adorned in stunning white dresses, and dead-happy grooms carried on dancing shoulders, and the carefree crowds of guests throwing banknotes up in the air for the men who played the riq and the daf amongst them… All of these, never mind, and just as much the rest of the great many lively things amounting to that Syria, from before security councils and international headlines. However much of it had spilled with us, five-and-some million times across the many borders, it would all be lost things on the world.

For most, Syria would be the revolution, the war.

Most would wince at what infamous hell had become of it.

They would ask me about the day I fled.

That story, nothing more than one in millions which have somewhere at some time a beginning more or less tragic, it starts with a tree flanking the road in front of my uncle’s house. The year was 2016, September was near in sight, and the day would have been absolutely mundane had I not been about to flee the country. 

I remember the sun to be nearly set on a burning-hot afternoon when the taxi pulled to the side of the road and I paid the man his fare. The first thing catching my attention through the car’s window, sixty feet off the road and one step above ground, was my uncle’s house: a lonesome one-level habitation with a large front porch facing south, stained walls of a tired ochre color and, as with any Syrian house belonging to any Syrian family with sons to make more of that family, a flat roof with rebars patiently pointing to the sky. I thanked the driver just as I pushed the squeaking car door open in the empty silence of the wide summer plain. I stepped outside, on that rug of dry grass which seemed to have forever failed to fully hide the earth. And then, once I had thrown my backpack over a shoulder and once I had turned towards the corner of that seldom traveled road and the dirt driveway leading to my uncle’s house, I found myself facing that old tree.

It was a chinaberry tree—Pride of India, some call it—with a great many cracks to show the flesh of its trunk through its light-grey-colored bark, and a thick network of vivid green leaves that never shed completely. Of course, to me, it wasn’t just any chinaberry tree. I already knew that one day, on my death bed, after it had cast on my entire existence the relentless shadow of its bulk and the restless dotted light of sunrays pushing through its crown, this one tree would be the ultimate thing finding its way back to me. Surely would I hear it whisper with a breeze or gasp with a gale, then, the way nature has of catching fleeting quivers of thrill and indignation; surely would I entertain the mystery of its trunk one last time, how lean it looked but how strong I knew it really was; and surely would I go on to bring these two things to the grave. For our chinaberry tree, you see, with the countless long hours I had spent sitting alone at its base, and with the many times my cousins and I had climbed into it, without the least care in the world, nothing met the purpose of symbolizing my childhood more than it did.

My story, how I wish it began when the suggestion was first made to me, that, Maybe we should leave the country—but we had stayed. How I wish at least for it to begin later, when I thought, She was right—but I had decided I would wait the war out. What truth perspective has come to offer me, far down along the way, is how bitter-plenty my lost opportunities had really been until that night, when I finally stopped at my uncle’s house with things to pick up and farewell to bid. That’s when I found myself in front of the chinaberry tree again, at the age of twenty-five, and that’s when the story of my journey out of Syria finds its beginning. Because I faced the relic of my childhood, I considered for a moment the life I had had before the uprising, and I recalled the very day I had understood this uprising would become a revolution and a war. 

This war has no winner, I told myself again.