No sirens, no peace: The quiet that’s breaking us

The sirens in my area seem to have stopped — or at least, the ones that come with sound. No rocket alerts are screeching into my dreams, no Red Alerts demanding I drop my coffee and sprint outside to the bomb shelter. The silence is, frankly, suspicious.

And yet I am not calm. I am not rested. I am not “getting back to normal.” Because there is no normal to get back to. Instead, I wake up in a void so thick it hums. I walk through a quiet so loud it pulses.

Make no mistake: the war is not over. It has simply shapeshifted.

Yes, there’s a ceasefire with Iran (for now — don’t blink), but Hamas is still firing, the Houthis are still playing ballistic roulette, and our soldiers — our barely-bearded boys in boots — are still dying in Gaza. The hostages are still underground. And our government is still spinning PR like candy floss over an unrelenting national funeral.

So forgive me if I’m not “fine.”

PTSD Isn’t Always a Hollywood Flashback Scene

Sometimes it’s just sitting on the bus, forgetting to get off at your stop. Sometimes it’s reading the name of a fallen soldier and vomiting quietly into your laundry basket. Sometimes it’s refusing to answer emails because you cannot fathom how anyone expects functionality while children are being buried and politicians are tweeting nonsense.

We Trained for Sirens. No One Trained Us for Silence.

The rush of the emergency — at least it gave you direction. “Run.” “Mamad.” “Text your sister to see if she’s alive.”

But now? Now it’s the void. An uncomfortable, echoing, bureaucratically ignored void. We are expected to bounce back, to “move forward,” to somehow channel the death-rattle of a broken national psyche into an Excel spreadsheet.

I find myself repelled by productivity. It feels obscene. I look at to-do lists and my stomach turns. Clean the house? The country is on fire. Schedule a Zoom meeting? A 20-year-old died in Khan Younis this morning. Buy groceries? Sure — do they sell mental stability in aisle six?

We’re Still at War. Just Not the Kind That Makes Headlines.

The IDF is in Gaza. The hostages are in hell. The Houthi missiles still fly. The children still flinch at thunder. And the adults — the ones who were so composed, so busy surviving—are now crumbling, quietly, off-screen.

This is not the “after.” This is the interlude — and we know Act II is coming.

The world may scroll on, and our own leadership may pretend otherwise, but some of us are still standing in the kitchen at 3AM wondering if that sound was a backfiring car or a Qassam rocket.

Name It. Say It. Don’t Let Them Bury This Too.

I am not weak. I am not lazy. I am not hysterical.

I am altered.
I am grieving.
I am deeply, viscerally done pretending this is survivable in silence.

If you feel this too — the buzzing in your limbs, the dread in your bones, the ghost of urgency with nowhere to go — then you are not alone. You are not broken. You are reacting appropriately to an ongoing trauma that has not been given the dignity of a pause.

We don’t need another siren to justify our pain.
We need to hear each other breathing.

Because if there’s no noise, and no acknowledgement, we will fracture silently — until we don’t.