War and Your Neighbors' Pajamas

by Jaime Conlan (United States of America)

I didn't expect to find Israel

The jets fly by in pairs. A door slams on accident. A motorcycle skids across the road. And even in the silence, I feel like I can still hear the sirens. I wonder about the odds. The first time in five years that a missile makes it to Tel Aviv and the first time I'm ever in Israel – I'm here for it. Our paths cross. I stay up until 5 a.m. crying on the balcony, and everyone else goes out to party. Another jet flies by. I rewind. Everything replays as my brain processes something that is so novel for me yet so ordinary for everyone else. Fear tastes like normalcy to those accustomed to this world. This world of music and film and beauty, but still, missiles. “I love you, and I don’t know when I’ll be able to talk, but I needed you to know that the bomb sirens are going off,” I waste a second wondering if I should even say anything at all before hastily pressing send, a last message to my boyfriend. “I love you so much.” The all-glass restaurant on the beach is no place to be when Israel’s missile warnings go off. They tell us not to worry, everywhere is required to have a safe room now. I look around our makeshift safe room in the restaurant’s kitchen. It’s missing two walls, and I can smell grease burning on the stove beside me. If I wasn’t busy crying about my last day on Earth, I would’ve laughed at our differing definitions of “safe.” There are some people down below on the sidewalk, and their drunkenness coats their laughter like a soft drizzle. Their laughter sings to me. It reminds me of my roommate’s singing. She sings to the empty balcony, an attempt at self-soothing in strange lullabies, as the rest of us disperse into our own silos of bad coping mechanisms. There’s cigarette smoke from the balcony a few doors down. It feels like sensory overload in a vacuum. The smell of the smoke. The sound of her singing. The sweat on my palms. The missile that keeps replaying on the TV, but only for 60-seconds on CNN. Not enough to merit a longer segment. A few days later will be different, but I don’t know that then. A few days later I’ll be sitting at a bar divulging my deepest fears to people I met six days ago. We’ll be sitting with an Israeli filmmaker, and he’ll say, “How were the missiles?” We’ll shrug and I’ll awkwardly look down at my feet, embarrassed by my bout of tears from the time the sirens went off while my roommate prayed over me and I debated escaping into the ocean. A missile-threat mermaid, I could be. He’ll smile at our shrugs. “This is war: When your ex-girlfriend texts you the day after the missiles and asks, ‘Are you okay?’ followed by, “Would you have reached out to me to ask me if I was okay if I hadn’t asked you first?’” He’ll laugh then, meet our shrugs. “War is seeing all of your neighbors in your pajamas. Every serious war movie ever made was made by someone who has never seen war. War is funny.” He turns away and conversation resumes in the absence, but my mind lingers on what he says. The darkness of war and human suffering looms over me, but every Israeli I meet speaks of endurance. It is resilience woven into music, film, a soft thank you between strangers. The rain begins to fall around my tired body, and finally I feel my weakness give way to strength. The beauty of this pain and fear really is simple. It’s waking up the next day. Humans tend to overcomplicate things. Sometimes you don’t need a solution, you just need to go to bed and try again, because that’s what everyone else does. That’s all you can do. The jets will continue to fly by. I will continue to go to sleep and wake up again. This is war, and life, and all of the excruciating beauty and suffering in between.