It’s a Monday afternoon – just two weeks since 7 October – and I’m floating somewhere outside myself as I teach my weekly multimedia class at the university. I hear myself cracking jokes and responding to students’ questions. I feel myself smiling. But when I look down at my arms and hands as I pack up at the end of class, I don’t recognize my own body. There’s that familiar golden peachy tone, that skin that took Tel Aviv’s sun so many years ago, and carried it back with me to the US. And yet, I can’t quite place these particular arms and hands.
But the phone, the phone is familiar. After I wave my last student goodbye, I pull it from my purse and read the latest messages. My ex-boyfriend in Tel Aviv – an Israeli vegan, anti-Zionist pacifist – tells me he’s now looking for a stun gun for self-protection. Another friend, a photojournalist who lives in the north, not far from where Israel has been exchanging fire with Hezbollah, is searching for a bullet proof vest. He’s driving around with an axe in the back of his car, he adds, punctuating the sentence with the laugh-till-you-cry emoji. I send messages to my distant cousin in Pardes Hanna, a laidback town between Tel Aviv and Haifa, asking about her and her family, and to one of my closest friends, who lives in Eilat – a city that will soon be under rocket fire from Yemen. All over the country, my loved ones are terrified.
