There is a way war settles into the body long before it ever reaches the ground beneath your feet. It arrives first as a headline, a flicker on a screen, a number too large to comprehend. Then it grows teeth.
It becomes names. A child carried through dust. A mother counting what is left.
Not in the abstract way people say you are everywhere, in everything. I mean here, now — inside the rubble, inside the smoke that clings to skin, inside the silence that follows after a bomb has done its work. I want to know if you are present in the moment a person realises their life has split into a before and an after.
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Because from where we are standing, it feels like the world is breaking in too many places at once. Wars are no longer distant things we read about in history books. They are live-streamed, dissected, debated in real time.
They exist in the scroll of a thumb, between an advert and a meme. And yet, despite how close they appear, they remain impossibly far from those of us who are not directly caught in the crossfire. That distance is its own kind of violence, the kind that allows us to look away, to continue eating, laughing, living, while somewhere else, someone is learning how to survive loss in its rawest form.
Do you see them? Do you see the families who sleep in shifts because the night is louder than the day? The fathers who have to decide which child to carry when there is no time to carry both?
The mothers who whisper reassurances they no longer believe? The children who have learnt the language of sirens before they have learnt how to read? I wonder what it does to the soul to grow up like that.
We talk about trauma like it is something that can be named and treated, something that exists within the neat boundaries of a diagnosis. But what happens when trauma becomes the environment itself? When fear is not an event but a condition?
When survival is the only curriculum? God, if you are watching, then you must also be witnessing the quiet wars, the ones that do notmake headlines. The war inside a person who has lost everything and is expected to keep going.
The war of displacement, where home becomes a memory instead of a place. The war of waiting for news, for aid, for a ceasefire that feels more like a pause than an ending. The war of remembering what life used to feel like before it was reduced to the basics of food, water, shelter and the fragile hope of making it through another day.
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