Burrowing Our Way Back One Millimetre at a Time

We were budding branches turning our faces towards the sun. We were soft-petaled red-and-white anemones, delicate purple irises, bright yellow daffodils. The skin kissed our skin and sprinkled our noses and cheeks with delicate drops of gold. The world and everything in it felt boundless.

 

We wanted to be outside for as long as we could. We wanted to sway and shimmy to the pulsating, futuristic rhythms of trance. Colourful canopies hung over us as we danced, pink and orange, purple and green, forming white star shapes over our heads. The performer’s tent flashed neon. We moved wildly, crowds of us shaking our curls and dreads, waving our turquoise rings and smiling as our teeth glowed, sweating in our patterned caftans, and red bikini tops and shorts, lifted on each other’s bare shoulders, laughing and shouting, our energy endless. 

 

There was room to spread out, to lie under the stars in sleeping bags and bright blue tents, to take in the beauty all around us: the trees swaying in the wind in the distance, the synths lulling us to sleep. 

 

In the early morning, some of us were still dancing, kicking up dust, ambling with our arms around each other, some of us we were barely awake, bleary-eyed, but we saw flashes of yellow and red shooting through the sky, we heard screaming and glass shattering, the whipcrack of bullets whizzing past our heads, we wanted to tell our friends to run but we knew it was too late. When we saw the bodies all around us, some of us pretended to be dead. 

 

When we were led into the dark, we felt our bodies change. Our limbs grew rubbery as we were pushed further down the rusting metal ladder, merging into a space narrow enough for us to move in single file, our shoulders hunched and merged with our sides, our thighs pressed into each other. We shrunk into ourselves. The air smelled like dust, like chalk and concrete and spray paint, like fear and nausea and hopelessness and claustrophobia. Our skin felt like blood and slime. They tried to bury us. They didn’t know that we were worms.

 

People don’t know enough about worms. They don’t know how resilient we are, how little of everything, even oxygen, we need to survive. They don’t know that up close, we look like carefully rendered charcoal swirls, full of chiaroscuro and texture. We’re as beautiful and miraculous as any of God’s creations. And we’re chronically underestimated, if people think about us at all. Sometimes, I think, maybe it’s better. You can survive for longer when people are thinking about you less. And that’s all we wanted to do, you know. All we wanted to do was survive.

 

We didn’t all love trance music. Some of us were die-hard fans of Astral Projection and Man With No Name, we wanted to hear songs like 'People Can Fly' and 'Dancing Galaxy,' we wanted to whirl and move as fast as we could. We wanted to feel the rhythms in every single cell in our bodies.

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Some of us thought it was cheesy. It was something to do in the latest in a string of exhausting national holidays. Rosh Hashana is a big one, it’s a celebration of the New Year, all the apples and honey and extra-sweet challah and hopes for the year ahead. Yom Kippur is serious and somber, you fast, you get sealed in the book of life, or death, for the year, if you believe in that kind of thing. Sukkot is the one where we build a hut, where we eat outside and celebrate the harvest. So what better way to celebrate the harvest than being in a place where you can see orchards and fields for a whole week? It was Shemini Atzeret. How many people even knew what we were supposed to be celebrating?

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On the morning of the last day, some people saw rockets in the sky. A few even filmed them, flying over our heads, as casual as fireworks. First it was a few, then it was the most any of us had ever seen. Code Red, people started yelling. Run, run. Kadima. 

 

We started running in every direction.

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We saw the guys in military fatigues, firing at anyone trying to escape. We sprinted, dashed to public missile shelters, behind bushes and the biggest trees in nearby orchards. Some of us hid inside a giant fridge. Some of us ran to our cars, desperate to leave, like so many ants moving millimetres on a crowded path, people shooting at close range, and our cars, like origami and plastic toys, were easily crushed and punctured. We heard explosions. Then they blocked the roads.

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Some of us lived in the area. Some of us had families, husbands, wives, and kids, teenagers, full cheeked babies with pudgy wrists and sweet-smelling skin. Some of us were grandparents. Some of us were kids at a sleepover, sleeping in Spider-Man- or Frozen-print sheets, waiting to drink shoko or a slather of chocolate spread inside a half-slice of pita.

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We never knew how many of us there were. Some of us were hidden in houses, moving around while the bombs shook the foundations of where we crouched, sometimes we were sure this was how we’d die, from the fire of our own army. There was never anywhere to run. When we tried, chains around our wrists and ankles, or in filthy, weeks-old clothing, it was obvious to anyone who we were, and we were returned like delinquent sheep who’d wandered too far away from our owner. A few teenagers were branded using a motorcycle exhaust pipe.

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Some of us were taken underground, crammed into a heat-filled, narrow passage. Later, someone said something about hell, and someone religious said if this is Gehenom, we have twelve months to pray to be taken to Olam Habah. Great, someone else said, so in twelve months, we’ll be dead, but we’ll be better off, in the World to Come.

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We struggled to imagine twelve more months. It was too dark to know what day it was, or how long it had been.

 

They didn’t feed us much, but they gave us water. We divided grains of rice like they were magic beans.

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Some of us slept on filthy mattresses, some of us slept on the floor. We were kicked and hit, told to be quieter, as if anyone could hear us. We told each other our life stories. We whispered about our interests, our families, our jobs.

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We met the leader once. He was not what we expected. We’d heard he surrounded himself with the youngest of us, and we pictured him strutting like a lion, walking through the dark followed by tiny prisms of light, rainbows, soft fluffy clouds we’d yearn to talk to and touch, but it’s just him, a slight, not-very-tall man, who fidgets and eyes us like a hyena eyeing a pile of carcasses. He has the cold-eyed gaze of a bottom feeder.

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We gave each other lectures on our interests to pass the time. We talked about all the things we’d lost.

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In my previous life, I made art; I had a painting in my bedroom that said Jerusalem is Everyone’s in Hebrew and Arabic 

 

I had plans to organize soccer games for Israeli and Palestinian kids

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I had plans to travel. There were so many countries I wanted to see

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In my previous life I organized international peace rallies, I drove Palestinian kids in need to Israeli hospitals, I pursued peace like my life depended on it, then I went home and baked cakes for my grandchildren’s birthdays

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In my previous life, I had a partner

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I had two kids

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I taught yoga and I practiced it every day

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I hiked with my dad

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I had Batman pajamas, and my best friend gave me his cape

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I was learning how to teach Pilates

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I had a mother who was dying. I knew it before, but I wanted as much time with her as I could get. I know she wants to be with me. 

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I had a boyfriend who loved me and I don't know where he is

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There was a girl I loved but I never told her. How would I tell her now? At night, I imagine different scenarios

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I fought with my baby brother before I left; instead of telling him his drawing was stupid, I wish I could tell him how beautiful it was

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I yelled at my sister for borrowing my clothes. I wish I’d just let her have them

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I had parents who drove me crazy, now I wish I could hear their voices

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I had my own room, my own bathroom

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I had clean clothes, a closetful, a washing machine, Band-Aids and Polysporin

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I had a home

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In my previous life, I had colour and variation

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I had gentle dreams, my worst nightmares were about work stresses or relationship stuff or friendships

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I showered whenever I wanted to

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I had two strong arms and hands and knees, no exposed bone and blood

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I used bathrooms whenever I had to go, I walked freely without asking for permission

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No one’s hands groped me as I tried to squeeze by

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In my previous life, I had friends

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I had religious parents

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Maybe I should have stayed home

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In this life I play out these thoughts over and over

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If I’d apologized

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If I’d just told them

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Had kissed him one more time, had hugged them. 

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We wondered if they somehow knew it anyway, if they sense our love, moving through the earth like tiny currents, the way we could sense theirs. If they knew how hard we were trying, digging and burrowing our way back to them one millimetre at a time. Worms move incrementally, but we’re still moving.

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It takes intense heat and pressure deep within the earth to form the world’s hardest and most valuable gems.

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We don’t know how many days it’s been or how many are still to come.

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But we have stories to tell you, stories where we amaze each other and ourselves.

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Where we protect each other, where we advocate, where we refuse where we ask for things.

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For prayer books and corn flour. For an older man to go free in our place.

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When we remember who we were.

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When we aspire to become survivors, leaders, diamonds.

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We could hear your voices, as if they’d been blasted over a loudspeaker, we’re waiting for you, be strong, blessing us like they did on Friday nights, May God Bless You and Keep You and Shine His Light On You, May You Feel His Presence Within You Always, and May You Find Peace. Just survive, we need you. We love you.

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So, we imagine ourselves standing in the light again. We imagine ourselves standing on a sidewalk, with traffic lights and cars and kids on bikes, our ears filled with the sounds of life. We imagine ourselves in our homes, in your arms, our bodies wrapping themselves around you like the branches of a strangler fig. We imagine planting ourselves so deep we can never be uprooted again. We imagine not having to imagine anymore, being able to tell you, face to face, that you were the reason that we made it.