Around 11 p.m. one night, I was reading The Time Machine under the dim light of my table lamp. The thunder of bombardment penetrated the silence of the moonless night. Seconds later, the whole street was drenched in red and filled with sirens. One after the other, ambulances flooded the street, radiating this flamboyant color with their piercing wail.

I’ve always hated the color red. Since I was a kid, I’ve refused to wear red t-shirts or paint my fingernails red. Something about the color gives me an inherent feeling of danger and rage. Even when I learned in school the nature of colors, the question lingered: How can a mere reflection, a part of the electromagnetic spectrum of visible light with low frequency and high wavelength, provoke such an intense aversion?

My aversion began to make more sense the night of the bombardment. I didn’t sleep that night. Whenever I tried to close my eyes, red flashed in front of me. I’d seen and heard ambulances before, but that scene never left my mind. It kept wandering through the convolutions of my brain.

I once read that seeing the color red activates several areas of the brain, including the visual cortex, amygdala, and prefrontal cortex. These areas are involved in emotional response and play a role in decision making. Moreover, its long wavelength makes it one of the most visible colors in the color spectrum. It instantly grabs people’s attention and motivates individuals to take immediate action, enhancing safety awareness. That’s why stop signs and fire engines are red.

I’d never realized this until that night. That night, red was more than a color; it was a sign of urgency, catastrophe, and possible loss of lives. I wondered how the ambulance driver could have driven with only one color ahead of him and one violent voice heard. But if there is one thing I’ve learned, it’s that during war, there is no time to think. You just act, and you think about your actions later. So maybe that driver had only one mission to do, so he didn’t notice such circumstances.

Every now and then, I hear the same sirens, painting the street with the color of blood. And every time, my whole body shivers. I never get used to it.

There is a window just above my bed and a mirror in front of it. Every night, the mirror reflects flashes of light from ambulances coming and going from a busy hospital nearby that bathe the room in red. It brings back the memory of when I first saw Ilya Repin’s painting, Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan. The relentless shades of red — carpets, walls, and blood — stirred something deep within me, an unsettled feeling that visits me every time I hear a siren or see an ambulance. It became like a ghost, hunting and haunting me. A trauma among all other traumas left because of war.

The ongoing circumstances in Gaza mean that the color red is an essential part of it. The color of blood, the ambulances, the Red Cross vests, the “Breaking News” sign on the TV, the color of the night sky after a bombardment, and the eyes of someone crying over the loss of a mother, a father, a sibling, or a friend. Red seems like a life companion to every Gazan.

As I walk through the streets of my neighborhood, I notice red in unexpected places. The tattered red scarf among the rubble of the destroyed house at the corner, the crimson petals of the resilient roses that somehow bloom amidst the rubble, and the vibrant red graffiti on a wall that calls for peace. These reds stand in stark contrast to the more sinister reds of violence and loss, yet they all coexist, painting a complex tapestry of our lives here.

In the midst of the chaos, I sometimes even find solace in small, unexpected moments of red. The time my neighbor’s little boy handed me a biscuit with red wrapping, his face beaming with innocence and hope. Or when the evening sky turns a soft shade of red-orange, promising a new day. These moments remind me that while red is often a symbol of pain and fear, it can also represent resilience, life, and love.

So I continue to live with my aversion to red, knowing that it will always be a part of me, just as it is a part of Gaza. And perhaps, in understanding my fear and hatred of this color, I can begin to understand the deeper layers of my own experience and the collective experience of those around me. For in the end, red is not just a color; it is a reflection of our reality, painted in the hues of our struggles and our hopes.