A few weeks ago I went with a friend to visit her family in the south of Israel. Turns out it wasn't the best timing on my part. Gaza flared up again and decided to send over some nice, little, sweet presents.
Although I cannot truthfully say that I wished to avoid such things while here...I mean if it's happening, I'd rather have the experience than live in a delusion...I can definitely say I wasn't expecting anything to happen. I was already in the delusion then I suppose.
Oddly enough hearing rockets hit the ground does not just leave you with a feeling of horror. Sitting on the floor in a back bedroom, a thick sheet of metal pulled across the window, blocking possible shrapnel and all light, you expect to feel only horror. All you can hear in the dark room is arguing and worrying in a foreign tongue, the siren wailing through the suddenly dead city. You wait, working all the while to control the anxiety and fear. You wait. And when you hear the rumble of the hit, it leaves you with a mix of surprise and relief, as well as horror. The surprise is simple. The surprise is that there really was a rocket, and it really did hit. It wasn't a drill, or a false alarm. The relief is that you are conscious, alive, and far enough away that you were able to hear it hit. And then after, different from the anxiety and fear that came when you first heard the alarm, the wisps of horror dance about you, in your heart and mind, body and soul...they get all mixed up with your small warmth of relief. It's a strange feeling for sure.
It's been a while and I'm not in the south anymore, but when I hear the wind pick up and sometimes when the windows begin to make a whistling sound, everything in me stops for a milisecond, waiting for the sound to turn into the ghostly siren call that echoes and wails through cities in the south warning of the coming rockets. It sounds just like the wind at first. For awhile after I returned home to the North of Israel, every time I heard this sound here, after everything stopped for a fraction of a second, I would register the sound and breathe a sigh of relief to myself. I tell myself, I'm nowhere near the land where rockets fall infrequently like angry meteors from the sky. In reality, I am safe, but also only an hour's drive away.
