Dear Sebkhet Sejoumi,

I wonder how it feels to carry an entire city on your tired shoulders.
Every morning, Tunis wakes beside you, rushing through its noise and hurried
streets, while you remain still — silent beneath the weight of pollution, forgotten by
many who pass your shores without ever truly seeing you. Yet I see you.
I see the flamingos that still dare to land upon your waters like fragile pink prayers. I
see the reeds trembling in the wind as though they are trying to speak for you. And I
see the sadness too — the plastic, the sewage, the concrete slowly tightening
around your body like chains.
You were never meant to fight this hard just to survive.
Once, you were a sanctuary. A resting place for birds crossing continents. A
breathing space for the city. A mirror for sunsets and storms. Now you are treated as
though your existence is inconvenient, as though nature must apologize for taking
space in a world obsessed with buildings and roads.

But perhaps what hurts the most is that the people surrounding you rarely know your
true beauty or your importance.
Not because they are cruel, but because life has been cruel to them first.
Many neighborhoods around you struggle with poverty, marginalization,
overcrowding, and the daily weight of survival. When survival becomes the priority,
beauty becomes difficult to notice. Your waters are seen through exhaustion instead
of wonder. Your silence is mistaken for emptiness. And so the people closest to you
grow distant from the treasure living beside them.
Yet even wounded, you continue to protect them.
When heavy rains fall, you gather the floodwaters we cannot control. When the air
grows heavy with heat and dust, you still offer life to creatures with nowhere else to
go. Even abandoned, you continue giving.
That is what breaks my heart the most.

Because you deserve more than survival.
You deserve care.
You deserve dignity.
You deserve to be loved the way people love seas, forests, and mountains.
Sometimes I think your struggle is also ours. We, too, are living in a world that
moves too fast, consumes too much, and forgets the beauty of fragile things. And
maybe that is why your story feels personal to me — because beneath your polluted
waters, I still recognize resilience.
I hope one day children will walk beside you and speak of you with pride instead of
pity. I hope your waters become clear enough again to reflect the sky without shame.
I hope the city finally understands that you were never an empty space waiting to be
filled.

You were always alive.
And despite everything, you still are.
And maybe one day, you will no longer stand alone.
Maybe guardians will rise for you — people who will protect your birds, clean your
waters, defend your dignity, and remind the world that you are not wasteland, but
living memory. People who will teach future generations that your beauty was always
there, waiting to be rediscovered.
Until then, hold on.
Because even wounded landscapes deserve to heal.