Lilly's Recorded Voice

Oh, really?

the regime collapsed late on a Saturday night. My coworkers and I talked to a few Syrians who are living abroad now about what that night was like for them. One was up studying for an exam. Another was out to an anniversary dinner. Kept checking his phone. But the person I want to tell you about is Selma. She was in London on Saturday.

She lives in another part of England, but watching the news by herself in the days before that, she felt like she had to be around other Syrians. So she got on the train and headed to her friend's apartment. She'd been crashing there since Thursday.

It felt like their job to not look away. Something huge was happening back home. The rebels kept taking more and more ground each day, liberating more and more cities with hardly any pushback. Everyone was worried that Assad would do something desperate, like retaliate with chemical weapons or bombings, or that Russia would jump in. Salma and her friends were barely keeping it together.

And were you guys like like were you worried or freaked out or was he kind of like, oh, this is something that happens?

Selma told me that her friend who kept fainting had been detained by the regime when he was a teenager, three times. He fled Syria after the third time, but his parents are still there. He was really concerned about them. Other people in the room were also having physical reactions from all the stress and fear.

It was from inside this crowded apartment, scattered with takeout containers and nervous bodies, that these friends then witnessed a sudden unraveling that none of them had anticipated. Selma's from Damascus, the capital, which was the seat of the Assad regime.

And as the rebels kept advancing across Syria, taking Hama and then Aswada and then Homs, her friends from those cities celebrated around her. If the rebels succeeded, her hometown would be the last to fall. When Selma saw a video of people standing on a tank in Umayyad Square in Damascus, singing Jannah Jannah, a revolutionary song, it was finally real to her. It was over.

They stayed up all night and then celebrated more the next day in Trafalgar Square. Then Selma went home and mostly laid in bed in the dark for a few days, trying to make sense of this brand new world. Selma's family had left Damascus in the first year of the war, 2011, when she was 15.

They moved to Connecticut, where she joined the soccer team and tried to do regular life while going to protests against the regime on weekends. Now she had to figure out how to reverse this thing she's been doing since she was a teenager, separating herself from Syria.

Someone else I talked to described it like this. Siri was on a different planet from the one he lived on now. There was no way to visit it. He had to flip a page, start a new life. Better not to think about it anymore. But now that the regime was suddenly gone, Syria was back on this planet, a place like any other place.

And they had to reset their minds to take that in, which was hard to do after so many years of doing the opposite. Salma started thinking about visiting home, not just in a dream way, but like the logistics of where she would stay when she went back.

The euphoria of the regime falling was laced with heavy feelings, too. In the days following the collapse, Asselma learned just how many people who'd been disappeared by the Assad government had been killed, were not coming home. She had another panic attack. Salma's been watching all kinds of videos coming out of the new Syria.

And there's a particular type that delights her, one I wasn't expecting.

Watching these people just be silly and happy. For Selma, she sees that as getting to watch them finally be free.

There's pretty much no way to overstate how much there is to do next, how many things will need to be figured out, how many unknowns there are. But, one person told me, none of it could be worse than what we live through already.