I’m sitting here, looking at the screen, feeling powerless and devastated by the images of a city I learned to love. A  place where I lived for four wonderful years, now slowly being destroyed. The music of that city, the familiar rhythm of its days, feels as if it has changed into something unrecognisable.

When you live in a city, the moment you step outside, you are surrounded by sound. Cars passing by, footsteps on the pavement, fragments of conversations, doors opening and closing, birds singing, leaves moving in the wind. A kind of daily symphony. After a while it fades into the background. You grow used to it and hardly notice it anymore.

When you travel, your senses awaken.  You pay closer attention to what surrounds you.. Everything feels new, almost luminous. Even if the sounds are not so different from those at home, they carry a different weight. They feel alive.

I was recently travelling in China and by the end of my journey, I conquered the Great Wall. I say conquered because I was quite sick at the time, though I didn’t know yet how sick. In fact I had pneumonia. I had consulted a doctor in Beijing who told me I had bronchitis. She gave me medicine and said I could finish the last visits I had planned. We chose a section of the Wall that was not the easiest, but even in that state I wanted to take it in fully.

I still remember the sound of the cable cars moving slowly up the mountain, the air growing thinner, and the landscape opening wider with every moment, in anticipation what was waiting for us above.

Once we reached our starting point,  we started climbing surrounded by the sound of people puffing and breathing heavily as they struggled toward the top. It was summer and the heat made every step feel heavier.

After a while I began to hear the whisper of my own lungs growing louder. With every step they seemed to insist more clearly that it was time to stop.

I was struggling, and I knew my body was trying to tell me that enough was enough. I obeyed and found a place along the Wall where I could sit and take in the view. It stretched wide and quiet before me. Between the passing footsteps of people still climbing, there were moments when I was almost alone. All I could hear was the low buzzing of large red insects flying past, too busy with their own purpose to stop.

I sat there catching my breath and imagining what it must have taken to build this Wall. The effort, the sweat, the exhaustion carried by those who came before us.

Building walls, homes and cities takes time and effort. Cities grow with their people and slowly become part of us. We learn to love our surroundings. We find our favorite places.We move through our days to the rhythm of the city.

But when the city’s music suddenly changes, the simple rhythm that once guided your days is replaced by something harsher. Something uncertain, as if the clock itself has forgotten how time is meant to move.

When the car horns give way to sirens.

When gossip and laughter dissolve into screams and crying, when the gentle breath of the wind is replaced by the sharp whistle of approaching missiles, the world you know begins to crumble along with it.

Even the steps of a child begin to change. Small feet that once ran freely through the streets start to move cautiously. Childhood, which should have sounded like laughter echoing between buildings, begins to learn the language of fear far too soon.

It is as if the familiar rhythm of life slips out of tune, like a song that once held the city together now breaking into discord. Streets that once carried ordinary days like a steady river begin to tremble, and the ground beneath everything you trusted starts to feel fragile, like glass under too much weigh

What stays with me are the memories of a country where diversity, in its landscapes and in its people, is something truly special. A place where mountains, cities, and open fields feel like different voices in the same song, and where every person I crossed paths with added their own note to it.

All those faces, those brief conversations, those shared moments of ordinary life remain with me. They stay in my heart, like photographs that never fade, like echoes that refuse to disappear.

I wish I knew that every one of them is safe. I wish there were a way for peace to return, gently and fully, like spring after a long and bitter winter. And more than anything, I wish that ahead of them there is still a bright future waiting. Where the streets can once again be filled with laughter, where the city can find its music again, and where children can walk without fear, their steps light and careless the way they were always meant to be.