I am afraid to make fun of the situation, and petrified at the thought that I might enter the first stage of grief, which is denial, and end up kissing and compromising.

It has been a year since I left Syria, maybe for good. A year of denial, guilt, grief and surrender. Nothing of the hero is left in me.

It is a coping mechanism that does not require delusions of reality, which makes it more plausible than some alternatives (denial, sublimation, projection, etc.).

Joy was an act of heroism, a blunt challenge in the face of death, while here joy turns into loads of guilt and the unreal rumination of stories that used to matter with the same friends with whom we shared life on the edge of death. Today we moved into living denial on the edge of our homeland, the denial that we are actually out.