It is November 2023, I sit with 2 colleagues in the control room of a national news company. On the monitor wall, a pretty foreign correspondent stands outside the Dangour Monument—a monument to those “virtuous” fallen who died setting up illegal settlements in Palestine. She stands facing her camera, which looks northwest over Gaza to the Mediterranean Sea and beyond.

Her high ponytail is undisturbed by the conflict apilled out around her. Her face is a mask of polite indifference. But the sky is not indifferent. It is a sickly orange. The reflection of fire and brimstone transforming the landscape, and her, making them both feverish to our eyes.

And through the bloody haze the trails of rockets cut like the wake of boats. Three at once, then five, then three again. She stands in silence. We watch in silence.

Everyone who’s worked national news has seen the horrific. It is not my first time working reports of armed conflict. It is not even my tenth time, or my twentieth. My colleagues had both worked the job for twenty years or more, and must have seen it a hundred thousand times. But in that moment, we see it again for the first time.

Finally, the oldest of us speaks. His tone is flat, his words blunt. “They’re going to slaughter them like pigs. And we are going to have to watch.”

He was right, that colleague. In the two and a half years since then, Isrealis have slaughtered Palestinians. They have slaughtered the Lebanese and the Jordanians and the Iranians and all who would be native to the land they wish to rule. They have slaughtered them like pigs, and like things worse than pigs.

And in those years, despite protest, despite speaking to anybody who will listen, despite crying for those who are lost, despite praying with my whole heart; I have watched that slaughter without the power to stop it.

I think about his words, that hill, those skies, every day.

It is the 4th of July, 2024. I sit under a tree in my local park, watching the fireworks through a gap in foliage. All the prime viewing locations were staked out by noon.

I do not mind. I don’t want to be in the drunk and churning crowd. I do not want to be marked as one of the celebrants. I am here to witness not to party.

All the fun of the 4th—family reunions, funnel cake, a party to escape and go exploring on my own—has fallen away. This year it is just me and the trees and the sky. I watch the fireworks. It seems they watch me.

Slowly one reality becomes superimposed over the other. The green grey tint of the sky becomes orange. I swear I can taste the gunpowder smoke in the air, though I am 2 miles from the detonation point. I trace the wake of the rockets like I traced the wake of the rockets that day in the control room. They are the same rockets. It is the same moment played back stranger, closer, all wrong.

Bile raises in my throat. All around me wildlife is disturbed by the explosions. Spiders descend from the branches above like rain, like refugees, like children seeking bunkers after the air raid sirens start wailing. I put my head between my knees and cry.

The parallels are too strong. Through my blocked ears I hear the crowd cheering for each new volley. I don’t know how anybody can stomach it. I want to scream at them to stop cheering and start actually seeing.

How can the play acting of rockets and bombs over our capitol, over our homes, over the trees and land we are supposed to love be anything but a warning? How can people look and not see us mocking those who our own bombs kill? Mocking ourselves? Bombing ourselves?

It makes me sick. It makes me furious. It makes me want to take each person present on that long lawn, drunk and reveling, and rub their noses in war like some people rub the noses of puppies in their own piss until they understand what they have wrought.

The moment the explosions stop, I leave. I take my anger with me.

I have never lived in a war zone. Except I remember 9/11, 2001, when my mother picked me up from preschool and we walked home smelling the smoke from the pentagon—our heads down, moving quickly to be undercover.

I have never lived in a war zone. Except, I do not remember a time before I knew what to do if the nuclear sirens wail. I do not remember a time before I knew that bunkers were useless and the only thing you can do is run.

I have never lived in a war zone. Except, my grandfather and greatgrand father are veterans. They carried and still carry their wars with them. Except, I spent 8 months in out patient for PTSD and soldiers suffering from war were most of my peers. Somedays all we talked about, them and I, were the things the military had done to us and our families.

I have never lived in a war zone. Except, my high school best friend’s dad had lost a leg to a landmine. Except, my step fathers family is Tamil and they have to constantly evaluate their perception in relation to the Tamil Tigers. Except, the first think my mother and step father had to do when they bought land on the east coast of Sri Lanka was check it for unexploded ordinance.

Except, my mom was convinced our house was wiretapped when I was young. Except, I have been stopped by TSA and asked why my mom’s dog, Che, was named after a terrorist. Except, I have had a friend who FOIA’d her partners FBI file as a dissident for valentines day. (He requested hers in return).

Except, I rioted in the streets during the George Floyd uprising and I still wake somedays dreaming of tear gas. Except, I once sheltered in place for an hour and a half convinced that we were in the middle of a mass shooting, only to discover hours later it was a man with a BB gun. But we cowered not because we were mistaken, but because it had been real so many times before.

Except, that I spot snipers on the roofs of the government buildings every time I leave my house. Except, every street corner of my city has men in desert camouflage carrying loaded M16s. Except, every Tuesday from April to September the park which is my front lawn is taken over by the Marines so they can practice their dress maneuvers. Except, that two or three times a day the distant sounds of the Taps creeps in my window from the military cemetary nextdoor and I know another young man is being lowered into the ground.

And all this not to mention the fact that I live on land where the indigenous population was slaughtered like pigs. Not to mention, I live in a country that dropped bombs on its own to stop black people from rising up. Not to mention, the Indian wars never ended, the war front just moved to our hearts and our voices. Not to mention we dropped bombs on White Sands, on Bikini Atol, on large swaths of Nevada.

I have never lived in a war zone. Except, of course, I have.

It is 7pm on the 4th of July, 2026, and my nerves are already shot. Fighter jets had been flying so low over my house that the smoke from their engines hit my windows before it dissipated; so low everything in my house not nailed down rattled at their passage.

I knew what the sound was. I had known to expect this. But constant, arrhythmic, rattling booms are not something I can handle well. My body tenses in readiness for the crash, for the bomb, for the shrapnel and bullets. My instincts tell me the moment the explosion stop I need to leave my house to start pulling my neighbors from the rubble.

I can’t take much more so I put on my headphones which do little to drown it out and I sleep.

I wake at 11:58pm, cold sweat soaking into my sheets. I see a text from a friend which says the clouds over the Capitol look like a clawed hand. Last I knew the national mall had been evacuated and a storm of massive proportions seemed to be on its way, but I hear no thunder, see no rain. Only a second of silence caught in a day of noise.

Then it comes. First the noise of the fighter jets, then the screams, then an explosion so long and loud I think it could not be fireworks at all. I think something must have happened and they all went off at once. But no, it is as planned only later.

It shakes the buildings like an earthquake. It startles birds startle from their nests. I look out from my sickbed, out of my window, towards the edifice of the apartment building behind me. It bricks, normally a dirty off-white, are glowing bloody red. It is painted, a luminous omen, by man made fires the colors of war and death.

I pray that this is the end of the demonstration and that I slept through the rest. But it is only the begining. The noise keeps coming. The screams and shouts rise and fall, seemingly with no relation to the explosions themselves.

I need to piss. I’m starving. But I can’t get up. Laying down puts me below my window’s line of sight; if I get up someone will know that I am home and this house too will become a target of the bombings. I can’t walk across the living room with its picture window unshaded. I cant make a target of my self.

Lay low, my instincts say. Ride this out, they say. I remember the words of my teachers saying, when it all gets too much go low to the ground, learn from the rock and the dirt, let it protect you.

Eventually I move, but only by crawling-out of my bed onto my hands and knees. First, to the restroom—safe enough with its single window enclosed in the shower. Then on my belly, crawling like I’m back in the jungle, across the floor of my living room. In my kitchen, I cook with the lights off.

I light Incense to drive away the smell of gunpowder. I sit with a burning pan in my lap smoking cedar, breathing it in. I deadbolt my door. These things help but still it goes on and on and on.

For forty-five minutes there is no quiet, only the visage of war. For forty-five minutes we do to our capitol what we did in Vietnam, in Iran, in Afghanistan, what we told ourselves we did only to others. For forty five minutes, in the early morning of July 5th, 2026, bombs fall over DC.