
The breathless streets were filled with the echoes of war, yet somehow, life went on. The sun dipped low, casting long shadows as my family and I made our way to safety. We were escaping our neighborhood, where intense military operations were underway. Our destination was a place where our relatives had sought shelter, although they had arrived earlier. It was an educational institution, a university that the Israeli forces had declared safe. It was supposed to be just another move, but here, even the ordinary can abruptly turn extraordinary.
I lingered behind, walking a little slower with my brother. We were still close enough to see our parents and siblings ahead, their figures moving through the twilight, the warmth of their presence grounding me. An unexpected wave of gratitude washed over me. In a place where families were torn apart every day, mine was still here — alive and together. I whispered words of love and thanks, reciting verses from the Qur’an under my breath, hoping to shield us with faith from the chaos that seemed to lurk around every corner.
Gunfire echoed in the distance, but I barely flinched. It had become like the wind, or the rustling of leaves — constant, ominous, but familiar. We walked on, believing danger was far away, until it wasn’t.
Without warning, a garbage can in front of us exploded, riddled with bullet holes. The shock jolted through my body, and the stench of war hit me. It was thick with metal, smoke, and destruction — a suffocating mix that clung to my skin and clothes, making me recoil. My father’s voice rang out, sharp and commanding: “Lay down!”
We dropped to the ground, faces pressed against a hard, smelly drain cover. I turned my head and saw it — a tank at the far end of the street, sitting there like a metal beast ready to pounce. It was something out of an old war movie, the kind we watched in history class. But this wasn’t history. This was now, and we were not soldiers. We were just a family caught between the teeth of malice.
I glanced back, and my world shattered. My father lay on the ground, blood pooling around him, turning the earth a dark crimson. I wanted to scream, to run to him, but my mother held me back. Her grip was iron, though her voice broke as she whispered, “I’ve lost one; I can’t lose yet another.”
We scrambled into a nearby building, the air choked with dust and panic, but my mind wasn’t there. My thoughts were with my father. A bomb exploded outside, shaking the walls. It felt as if everything inside me — the safety, the love, the memories — was shaking, as though the foundation of my life was crumbling.
I felt, in my heart, that he was gone. The very idea of seeing him shredded was too much to bear, yet I ran back outside, fighting through the hands trying to stop me. And there he was — my father, lying injured, but impossibly, smiling. He waved at me — a final heroic goodbye, a memory that would burn forever into my mind. The tank looming behind him was poised to fire again, and for a moment, I thought it would be our end.
Then, out of nowhere, a donkey appeared, galloping down the street — a creature of instinct fleeing the chaos. The tank shifted its aim, and in an instant, the donkey’s head was blown off, sacrificed to the madness of war. With the tank distracted, we seized the moment to pull my father inside the building. The thundering discharge of the tank’s fire echoed through the air, an explosion so powerful it seemed to suck the breath from my lungs. I imagined the gunner’s viciousness, his aggression evident in the force of the blast. The bitter smell of burning metal and flesh lingered, the invisible residue of war.

As the sun set on that bleak winter day, my thoughts were of the fragility of life. My father’s smile — his supposed last gift to me — the donkey’s sacrifice, and the silence of those who could have helped but didn’t, haunted me. All this lingered in the eerie quiet of the streets, as though the world had exhaled its last breath, and I had been its only witness.
That night, I couldn’t sleep, wondering about tomorrow. What was I supposed to do? Two words I had to study for an English proficiency test got caught in the tangle of my thoughts: “gloomy” and “sanguine.”
I searched tentatively for their meanings. “Gloomy,” I learned, meant dark and pessimistic, like the heavy clouds that never seemed to leave our sky. And “sanguine” — that one surprised me — meant optimistic, hopeful. Like the way I felt despite it all, the way I believed we would survive. Tomorrow came, and we were still alive.