al-Malikiyah, Oct. 14, 7 a.m.

As the sun rose over al-Malikiyah, I went up to the roof to take one last photo of Syria. This was a town that had been largely spared the brunt of the violence. Today it represented the loss of a people’s hope for change. A huge part of the young generation had emigrated. Many of their parents and grandparents remained, like the old man and his neighbor, a woman in her 60s, sitting under a pomegranate tree in the house where he grew up, a picture of Assad still taped onto his window; a deceptively faded image of the current brutal reality.