War Somewhere Else

There’s a war happening, but not here. Not yet, not where I am. I can walk outside whenever I want. I have enough food, water, electricity. I’m safe—as safe as anyone gets in whatever this time is. But somewhere else, people are living in something I can barely imagine. Especially the kids. I’ve seen the images enough times to know I don’t actually want to know what they see every day.

The thing about living in relative peace is you stop thinking about it as a choice or a fortune. It’s just the default. You forget that the default could evaporate. You forget because forgetting is easier, and because you can’t sustain genuine terror about something that isn’t actively happening to you, no matter how much guilt tells you otherwise.

But sometimes something catches you—a photograph, a statistic about children—and you’re forced to sit with the thought: what if it were here? What if I couldn’t leave my apartment safely? What if my kid couldn’t go to school? What if none of the ordinary certainties held? It’s not really the thought that breaks you, because you know it could end as easily as it arrived. It’s the knowledge that for someone, somewhere, that’s not hypothetical.

I don’t know what to do with that knowledge except hold it. I want to believe it won’t happen here again, but the more I look at it, the less sure I am. I just know I don’t want to find out.