Image by Elizabeth Tr. Armstrong
HOF — I was born an outsider in an unforgiving place. I’ve spent my whole life searching — for a way out, for a way in, for a people to call my own. But most days, I feel like an orphan.
My father was one too, though he never said it. He and his siblings carried the same wound — foreign blood, foreign manners — but easier times. They found families, careers, and the illusion of belonging.
Except for my father, the most stubborn of them all, everyone left Syria at some point. My aunts and uncles and their children headed for the Anglophone world one by one — Australia, the U.S., Canada, London. It was easier for them to find home in places where everyone was a foreigner.
I wanted what they had: to grow up, to move West, to live a “normal” life. But the map changed. The roads they took are gone. We now live in an age where home is an algorithm, and relevance a subscription.
If I could, I’d wind back the clock — to the analogue hum, to the institution of the living room, to a time when people had neighbors, not followers.
I remember our single TV channel. It spoke to everyone — children and adults, men and women, the devout and the cynical. We watched our one-hour cartoon, then the sitcom, then the nine o’clock news. It didn’t matter if it was propaganda. It was ours. It gave us a shared grammar for life. My father watched it on the road, my uncle at home, and when they met, they could argue about the same story.
That was our network — not fiber optics, but flesh and ritual. A story we inhabited together.
But that unity had a cost. One story for all meant one truth for all, and no space for those who disagreed. What we called community was also control — a comfort built on silence. Still, even that silence bound us. And perhaps that’s what I miss: not the message, but the melody of togetherness.
Then came the satellites, the endless choice, the illusion of freedom. Every roof sprouted a dish; every room, a separate screen. One family, five hundred channels, a thousand truths. Then came the internet — not a revolution, but an amplifier of the fractures already forming. It didn’t invent loneliness; it just globalized it.
The old world didn’t vanish overnight. It eroded — news bulletin by news bulletin, click by click. The rituals that once united us — family dinners, communal debates, public squares — were replaced by personal feeds, private opinions, invisible crowds. We became citizens of our own mirrors. The more we connected, the more invisible we became.
By the time the Arab Spring arrived, we were already divided — not between nations, but between narratives. The uprisings didn’t shatter our world; they revealed how shattered it already was.
I escaped the first collapse in Syria, only to arrive in Europe and witness the slow collapse of its own certainties — different symptoms, same disease. Everywhere, the same fatigue: people scrolling through chaos, angry yet isolated, connected yet unseen.
We are billions of orphans, suckling on the signal.
So tell me — do we stop it? Can we?
Perhaps there is no way back to the analogue hum. Perhaps the task is not to rebuild the past, but to humanize the present — to turn these cold connections into living threads. To remember that behind every screen, there’s still someone listening — someone just as lost, waiting for a story big enough to hold us both.
Roumani Line 