International Lesbian Day – 8 October
Sami Al-Aghabashi – GEM
Manar never imagined that love could become an act of survival. She once believed love unfolded the way people around her described it: a passing glance, a gentle word, a quiet closeness that opens the door to a life built slowly and safely. But in Syria—especially in a city like Aleppo—love was a road lined with questions, fear, and that unsettling feeling of standing at the edge of a cliff whose depth you cannot see.
At thirty, Manar was a woman searching for a small corner of the world where she could breathe as herself. A space where her heart wasn’t questioned, where her refusal to marry a man wasn’t treated as a flaw, and where she didn’t have to put on a new mask every morning. She wanted a simple life—simpler than anyone around her could imagine.
She grew up in a home like many Syrian homes, where a girl’s future was framed by a single doorway: marriage.
Her mother repeated the same line she had heard all her life:
“Without marriage, a girl has no support.”
But Manar knew the kind of support her mother meant was not the support she needed. She needed something different—something no one around her had the language to understand.
In her teenage years, she began to feel her heart leaning quietly toward women. A soft, unmistakable pull that awakened more questions than answers. She didn’t have a name for what she felt, but she knew it was real.
Then she met Salma—an encounter that made the world feel less harsh.
Manar describes her simply: “She made everything softer.”
And truly, who is more beautiful than someone who makes the world gentler?
Their relationship felt like walking through a narrow corridor between two walls of fear. Yet within that narrowness, Manar found a small refuge—a place where she could breathe with every cell in her body.
But society did not see what she saw.
It saw “a break from tradition,” “shame,” “danger.”
Manar saw something else entirely: a simple love, like any other love, trapped behind high walls.
“When I loved Salma,” Manar says, “I felt, for the first time, that I deserved to be seen… to be loved… to live without fear.”
But fear followed them everywhere—fear of a look, a word, a discovery, a punishment.
Manar asks herself, and perhaps asks all of us:
Will I keep hiding?
Will I keep fearing?
Will I keep living half a life?
She ends her reflection with a quiet truth:
“Today, I don’t live fully in the open, but I don’t live in the shadows either. I exist somewhere in between—a place where I can be honest with myself, even if I cannot be fully honest with everyone else.”
