‘Last Year I Died but This Year I Won’t’ (Belchior)

Last year I died so many times I lost count. I died along with Israel, with each life taken on October 7th. It was a blow that struck deeper than just bodies, it took away empathy, along with that stubborn idea that we were one people bound together no matter what. The country was left standing, of course, but somehow with its soul burned out, like a house gutted from the inside.

Since then we’ve kept moving, each of us with a piece missing. It’s not something you can explain or display, it’s a grief you carry without knowing where to put it. You wake up and the weight of it is right there, in the first breath of the day. You get through the day, dragging along, half on autopilot, half thinking about the lives left behind.

With each siren your heart jumps and once again it’s all back, that same sense of the ground giving way. We’ve learned to live like this, in a silent tension, looking around at a country that no longer recognizes itself in the mirror. A land where the questions have gotten harsher and the answers are nowhere to be found.

I look at the scars and don’t even know if I want to keep them or let them go. They mark us, yes, but maybe they mean less than the silence. They’re traces, fragments that say where we’ve been, but don’t say who we are. I catch myself thinking these scars are like dust on the skin, remnants of a road that we carry unwittingly. Maybe, one day, rain will come and wash them away.

Sometimes, the sky here opens up out of nowhere, like a promise that can’t be touched, a hope with no sense to it and in those moments, for a second, you almost forget the weight, as if something in you could finally breathe lighter. Maybe it’s that stubbornness, that half-blind will to keep going, that is still the most human thing left in us.

And so we go on, each of us in our own way, all of us with the questions that remain. Perhaps you, reading this now, understand this strange mix of hope and weariness, this way of walking through life without knowing if it’s still the same. And as the Brazilian poet and singer Belchior once said, last year I died but this year I won’t.