Sometimes I find myself wondering what it must feel like to have July arrive without something tightening in one’s chest. To come across another July photograph or video clip without instinctively looking away. To have July remain just another month.

For me, two years ago, July meant waking up and reaching for my phone before I even opened my eyes, hoping no new names had been added to the growing list of the dead. It meant refreshing Facebook every few seconds because there was nowhere else to look for news. It was sending the same message to friends across the city and waiting, hoping for a reply that sometimes never came—not because they were gone, but because the internet had gone dark in our side of the world. I remember how every notification made my heart race. The silence after the blackout, when nobody knew anything and rumours travelled faster than facts. I remember staring at a screen that refused to load, wondering whether the people I cared for were safe. I remember seeing faces of students who looked just like us, people who could have been classmates, seniors, juniors, and neighbours. Their photographs occupied our feeds before we had even learned their names.

Back then, I was still a student. Our conversations were supposed to revolve around coursework, internships, and graduation. Instead, we could only talk of roadblocks, missing friends, blood donation requests, and desperate pleas for information. Every day, we felt suspended between hope and dread.

Two years on, I spend my days in meeting rooms instead of classrooms. My worries are about deadlines, presentations, and month-end reports. Life, in many ways, has moved forward exactly as it was supposed to. But every now and then, July catches up with me.

Usually, it begins with the sky. On my way home from work, I often find myself looking out the window at an evening sky washed in gold. It is beautiful in exactly the same way I remember July skies being beautiful two years ago. And that is the cruel thing about memory. The sky that once made me reach for my camera now brings back memories I instinctively, rather than intentionally, revisit. A photograph appears on my feed. The sound of a familiar chant drifts from a commemorative video. Someone reposts footage from those days. And suddenly I am no longer 20-something, returning home from work. I am back in my room in 2024, staring at my phone, refreshing the same two apps, hoping for news that would tell me the nightmare was ending.

I remember July in feelings more so than in distinct memories. The knot that would form in my stomach every time the phone buzzed. The helplessness of watching events unfold from behind a screen. The overwhelming relief at the slightest hope of change. And the guilt of feeling relieved at all when so many families would never receive the message they had been waiting for.

Time is said to heal all wounds. Perhaps it does. But some months become irreversibly exceptional.

I often wonder what July feels like for people who did not live through it the way we did. Perhaps they scroll past another Facebook post without thinking much of it. Perhaps they remember only headlines. But for me, July stakes claim on multiple senses. It sounds like endless phone notifications. It looks like empty roads under heavy skies, with chaos and violence just a few streets away. An entire month has been permanently altered in some of our minds.

Lately, I have become nostalgic for July. Not because I miss those days, but because I long for who we were before them. There was an innocence in believing that history had only happened to other people. That, perhaps, such large-scale tragedies belonged in documentaries and textbooks, and not in our own lifetime. That ordinary students could remain ordinary students, and not become martyrs. July seems to be the dividing line of our generation’s “before” and “after.”

This month, I roll down the car window for a moment and look outside a little longer than usual. The sky is, as every other year, beautiful. And somewhere between the clouds and the evening light, I find myself back in 2024 again, if only for a few seconds.

Maisha Islam Monamee is a contributor to The Daily Star.

Views expressed in this article are the author's own. 

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