There’s a life I lead within the space between sirens. In my city, ninety seconds is all you get – ninety seconds to reach shelter when the alarms blare. It’s a timeframe that burrows into your bones, subtly reshaping everything. It doesn’t dominate every thought, but it’s always present, a quiet weight in the background of every action.
Life becomes a calculation of safety: distance to shelter, who you’re with, whether you can make it, whether *they* can. Then the questions sharpen, becoming impossible to ignore. Do you help your mother, reliant on a crutch? Your dog, paralyzed with fear? Your three-year-old niece? When the siren wails, there’s no time for thought, only instinct. You grab what you can and run.
The awareness arrives later, delayed and strangely detached. And then, just as quickly, you return. That’s the hardest part to explain. You climb the stairs, reopen your laptop, and attempt to finish the sentence you abandoned. You respond to messages, piece together the interrupted flow, and assure everyone that everything is fine. Sometimes, you even manage a laugh – a learned response.
Life resumes with an unsettling efficiency. This is what we call normal. But it isn’t. It’s normalization – a quiet acceptance of the unacceptable. A week ago, I woke to the scent of smoke drifting through my window. The television showed the footage, and a chilling question formed: “Isn’t that our street?”
Years of living this way teach you to differentiate between the sounds of interception and impact. We knew what we’d heard. I just hadn’t expected it to be so close. Initially, I tried to go back to sleep. But the smell intensified, revealing something had landed near my bedroom window – not a direct hit, but a fragment of metal, jarringly out of place amongst the everyday: a child’s ball, a red slide, a lemon tree, a wooden fence.
For a moment, I stood frozen, attempting to reconcile it with the logic of a normal morning. I took a picture and sent it to a few friends. “We’re OK,” I wrote, because that’s what you do. You move on. From the outside, this is often lauded as resilience – a society that endures, people who adapt, life that persists despite everything.
And it’s true. Life *does* go on. Cafes remain open, people go to work, conversations flow. There’s movement, routine, even laughter. From a distance, it can appear almost intact. But that’s precisely what makes it so easily misunderstood. Wars are discussed in abstract terms – strategy, deterrence, economic cost – language that renders them structured and contained.
That language fails to capture the reality of structuring a life around interruption, navigating a world where everything can halt without warning. It’s in this constant state of readiness that the true cost accumulates, not just in what’s lost, but in what’s subtly, irrevocably redefined. After more than two years, this existence feels both familiar and utterly exhausting.
You grow accustomed to it, even as it wears you down. There’s a quiet discipline to it, a way of moving through the world that becomes routine. And yet, with each lull in the conflict, the same instinctive hope flickers – that this will be the last time, that things will finally settle. But alongside that hope lies a quieter, more realistic understanding that they probably won’t.
For my generation, life is supposed to unfold in a linear fashion, years accumulating into something continuous. A degree should take three or four years. You’re meant to build something, fall in love, begin a life that feels like it’s finally taking shape. Instead, time refuses to move forward. I haven’t completed a single academic year without it being disrupted by war. What should have been a straight line has been fractured, repeatedly.
Time has been spent not building a life, but responding to one that’s constantly being dismantled. Now, my final year unfolds once more under the shadow of sirens, in and out of shelters, defined by the same pervasive uncertainty. And yet, to the outside world, it still appears as continuity. Over time, your expectations shift. You stop questioning whether this is normal, and start asking if it’s manageable. You build your life around that question.
From the outside, that can look like strength. If everything continues, how abnormal can it truly be? But abnormality isn’t always visible in what *stops*. There’s a version of my life that doesn’t include this constant calculation. It’s not extraordinary, simply uninterrupted – a life measured in plans, not contingencies, in years, not ninety-second intervals.
That life still exists, but the distance between it and the one I’m living now is about a minute and a half.
