Hello Reader
I don't usually write like this.
But it's been twenty days into something I'm still struggling to name. The silence of Eid finally gave me a moment to download and this is what I felt compelled to write down and now share.
This one is personal. I'm sure you will find yourself in it too.
The Sound of Silence
The construction site next door is closed, on account of Eid. That explains why I managed that extra 30 minutes of peace this morning, after weeks of being harassed out of my house by the excruciatingly painful noise of the piling machinery.
I didn’t realize how much I needed this silence until it arrived. For the past several weeks — from seven in the morning until seven at night, six days a week — every cell in my body was being abused in the process. I couldn’t even hear my thoughts. It started maybe a week before the war did, this construction site. And so, on that first day, February 28th, I was blissfully, almost embarrassingly unaware. The sounds of destruction above my head were completely swallowed by the sounds of construction next door.
Day two of the war was when it landed for me. A Sunday. Site closed. I opened the balcony door to enjoy the silence, only to start hearing a different kind of noise. I found out the way everyone finds out about things nowadays: an alert on my phone. But not just any alert. The same ringtone as the curfew alerts we got during COVID. Flashbacks on the spot, and panic hit — and that’s even before I read what the message said.
Because the construction was chasing me out of the house anyway, I had started working from a nearby hotel. I remember that first week — I’d just arrived, was unpacking my laptop, getting settled — when the alert went off on everyone’s phones all at once. You could feel the panic in the room. I caught the eye of the waitress.
Can I have a flat white?
She looked at me, puzzled.
Ma’am, are you not going to the shelter?
I said, what shelter?
She said, Everybody goes to the shelter in the basement.
I asked, so every time that alert goes off, everyone in this hotel goes downstairs?
She said, Yes, of course — the hotel is full of tourists.
I thought about it for a moment.
No, I think I’m going to be fine. Just get me my coffee, please.
A few days ago, the hotel was almost empty — tourists gone, silence everywhere. At some point during the day, the alert went off again. Somewhere in the same café, two men were in a meeting. They didn’t skip a beat. Everyone just silenced their phones and carried on.
Today is twenty days in. Twenty. How is that possible? I am sitting at home, cherishing the sound of silence … balcony door open, the university neighborhood I live in is empty. It’s the kind of quiet where you can hear a pin drop … and I am finally, really, letting the reality of what’s happening land.
I live in a war zone.
I keep writing it and stopping. I keep saying it out loud to see if it sounds any less impossible. It doesn’t. When I read the alert message, it starts with “Due to the current situation, potential missile threats…immediately seek a safe place in the closest secure building…” Am I really reading that sentence on my iPhone here in Abu Dhabi?
The authorities explained that the sound in the sky is not a danger arriving. It is the sound of the interception, the sound of protection. And something in me reorganized completely. My love for this country, already deep, has been amplified over these past twenty days in ways I cannot fully explain. I trust this leadership. I am forever grateful.
But the body is slower than the mind. It meticulously keeps the score. What it wants to do — every time the alert rings, every time the window panes shake — is exactly what my cats do: run. I watch them freeze and bolt, and I think: yes. Same. We are all just animals trying to make sense of the sky.
I ask myself sometimes, in the quiet middle-of-the-night moments: Is this what the children of Gaza have been living with since October 2023? Twenty days feels like a lifetime to me.
Every time I hear what this war is doing elsewhere, two things arrive at the same time: gratitude and guilt.
Something larger moves through me when I hear the interceptions. An awareness of the atmosphere — this thin, impossibly thin layer of air wrapped around a speck of dust floating in space. The missiles, the drones, the alerts, the wars, the construction sites — all of it contained inside this tiny pocket between rock and sky. Like echoes in a house with many corridors. At the end of one of those corridors: Lebanon. My home country. Over 900 dead in these twenty days. More than 2,000 were injured. The same war, a different corridor.
I feel for every country being leveled. I don’t have words big enough for the grief.
But I am safe. I know I am safe here.
This morning, I woke to an Eid message from Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed.
Our nation remains resilient and strong through the dedication of those who protect us and the solidarity of our people.
I read it and cried. Not from fear. From gratitude so sudden and so full it had nowhere to go but out. I catch myself weeping whenever I can these last few weeks. Last night it rained, which is unusual at the end of March in the UAE. I think the sky, like many of us, is weeping too.
Last week, I visited my parents. I had worked hard to find solid ground inside myself — picking and choosing my battles between the construction noise, the fibromyalgia flare, the chronic fatigue, and the war. On these rare days of relative inner calm, I wanted to bring some of it to them.
The visit did not go the way I planned. Within minutes, I had stepped on a landmine. Ten seconds, one wrong sentence, and I was pulled right back to that stinking old familiar place — the one my body is still keeping the score of. I patched things as best I could and left. I drove home with the old pull rising — apologize more, fix it, hate yourself — and then something in me went quiet and said: no. Not this time. I’m older and wiser.
Driving back home, I had this thought: I am more afraid of the hidden landmines at my parents’ house than any of the missiles flying overhead.
Some interceptions are invisible. Some shields you have to build yourself.
