When my country attacked my country, I cheered with enthusiasm and gasped in horror. “Now they’d get what they deserved, those bastards,” I said in the angry tone of the men I’d watched in black-and-white movies about World War II. Then I beat my chest and wailed and tried to pull out my own hair like I’d seen my grandmother do when my grandfather died. Of two minds, two hearts, and two stomachs, I walked around the house in a frenzy until I settled in the kitchen to make a breakfast of hot black tea and Lucky Charms.
If you are not a pilot or a drone operator or a person having their house blown up, there is not a lot to do in a war. I refused to give up my routines, even as bombs destroyed everything around my aunt’s house and then everything around my uncle’s house and then everything around my niece’s house, empires of rubble spilling out where there used to be hospitals, playgrounds, schools. Rubble rubble rubble.