It's All So Tiresome
Texts from exes in a week of ballistic missile strikes.
If I were to describe what it feels like to live as a civilian through a major conflict and bombing campaign, I would say it’s like being a Chinese engineer in the Congo attempting to acquire gravel to build a road. I am referencing, of course, the 2011 documentary-turned-meme Empire of Dust.
How is it similar at all? Well, you’re all transported to a dreamlike realm where nothing works, nothing seems to matter, nobody knows what’s going on, you can’t seem to do anything, you’re running around pointlessly, communicating to do mundane things feels like a Herculean task, and you’re just exhausted from existing. As the engineer says laconically at one point in the film, “It’s all so tiresome.”
As I write this, it’s been almost a week since the Israel-Iran war began. It feels like a month. I’ve slept about three hours a day, due to the sirens, and I have it easier than many. I’m not even living in any of the most at-risk places.
I’ve still been going to work each day. Everyone at my plant is in a sleep-deprived haze, but we’d rather be occupying ourselves throughout the day than just sitting at home doing nothing. Are we an essential business? Not technically, but in my opinion making beer is an essential service in this time of crisis.
My day consists of waking up to an air raid alarm before my morning alarm, then waiting for my boss to confirm if we’re actually working today or if we’re starting later because we’re all in shelters when we’re supposed to be on our commute. I can’t even make coffee or breakfast anymore, because a power surge from a ballistic missile hitting the grid short-circuited my stove. I’m just waiting to know if I’m working today, lying awake with a headache the product of sleeplessness and grinding teeth.
I get the confirmation, work is a go. The beer must go on. On the way in, I stop at a gas station and get an energy drink. The attendant and I both do the transaction like slow-moving aliens in a stupor. I show up to work and doze off. I check the valves and everything I’m doing. If the beer plant explodes, it will at least be from an Iranian missile and not me forgetting to check a pressure gauge.
My break is being on my phone in the shelter as I feel the thud of impacts and interceptions. I come home and try to nap, but the siren stops me. I don’t get up this time. I think, you know what? Fuck it. They can take me.
I still can’t sleep.
It’s all so tiresome.
I don’t know how I feel when people in my life text me to ask if I’m okay. What am I supposed to say to them? I appreciate the gesture, but what does it even mean to be okay? Am I scared? Honestly, no, but I know subconsciously it affects me. Even before this war, I would tense up when I heard wind that sounded like a siren. I’d have nightmares of Tel Aviv being nuked, over and over, after thinking of the day I pulled my moped to the side of the highway and saw a sky filled with Iranian ballistic missiles detonating overhead.
You do think about all the people, especially people back home in the States, especially once-friends, who haven’t texted you. What are you supposed to do with that? The silence. Should you take it as an insult? Indifference? Should you be hurt?
I lost all my non-Jewish friends after the October 7th attacks, except for two. I was living in Texas and it was like a wall came down. Everyone mostly just ghosted or blocked me with no explanation. One laughed about the idea of me getting killed by Hezbollah, and another at least gave me the courtesy of an angry phone call. I did my best to talk it out with him, for the sake of all the years we were close, of what we once meant to each other. He blew up at me, and I let him say his piece, and we didn't get far.
After the blow up, he called me the next week with a family crisis, and again I listened. I hoped things between us were alright. Eventually, he asked me how I’m doing, and I answered honestly. My train station had just been bombed, with the situation in Lebanon I was waking up to sirens every other day, missile falls in my town and explosions during high holiday services in synagogue. I could see the interceptions and feel the resulting shockwaves. I don't know what he was expecting, but he seemed confused. He told me he thought I was just chilling in Israel. I laughed and said no. In the course of that call, after all his ranting, he stated himself that he doesn't even know the difference between Hezbollah and Hamas.
That was the last time we spoke.
It’s all so tiresome.
A lot of the people asking if I’m okay are actually women I’ve dated. It’s been a ‘ghosts of girlfriends past’ situation. One wanted me back, and I briefly heard her out, only for us to fall back into familiar arguing. Hearing from others, it was touching, a little nostalgic, maybe bittersweet.
I myself reached out to someone I was recently seeing, someone I ended things with a couple months ago. An apartment very close to her was blown up in a mass casualty event. She replies back, “I’m not dead yet,” with a wink emoji.
We start chatting. The topic turns to work. Like me, she’s de facto essential. She’s the bar manager at a luxury hotel in Tel Aviv. I ask if she wants me to stop by, and she does, and I get on my moped. Someone in Tehran is firing more missiles in my general direction, so I pull over on the side of the road with a bunch of cars under a bridge. It’s hot even with the shade, the air acrid.
I get there. I’m so tired. I’m sitting at the bar. We have the venue completely to ourselves as the smooth jazz playlist echoes through the lounge. I guess rooms here go for something like five grand a night.
It’s an eerie experience, the quiet, the isolation, the jazz. It’s like living in a noir film, but more dysfunctional. In the dreamlike loneliness I light up a cigarette and this woman I saw back in springtime slides me an ashtray. I ask for a negroni and she obliges a healthy pour. She tells me how I’m the first man who ever dumped her, how much of a blow it was to her ego. She tells me how much I broke her heart, and how this motivated her to go on a huge self-improvement kick.
She does look great. She has a visibly new tan, and she honestly looks happier and much more alive than when we were together. I apologize for breaking up with her over text. To give you some context, it was an intense few weeks, and I ended things after she dropped a benzo and got weird at the first dinner where I met her family. She said that night that she was mad I got on so well with them. She kept crying about how we were inevitably going to break up because we don’t have anything in common. I just couldn’t do it.
At this empty, stupidly-expensive hotel bar surrounded by missile strikes she tells me she was in love with me, but she’s not anymore. I tell her I wish she had told me, that I was in love with her as well, but I’d honestly thought she didn’t like me very much.
She tells me it’s okay because she’s really discovered herself in the aftermath. She even went to an orgy and sex-themed party. What? Yes, an orgy and sex-themed party. She had fun, so she says. Did she have sex in front of people? She stays coy.
“How many people?”
“Oh, not that many.”
We all respond to war in different ways. Her story sounds plausible enough. I could even potentially buy that she was planning on visiting a BDSM dungeon, as she claims, before the Iran business put that on hold. She tells me she already bought a leather “whore dress” and everything.
I’m suspicious. This fabrication may have worked on a lesser man, but I am a grandmaster with 2200 ELO at defending myself from 8D manipulation by ex-Soviet women. I know a ruse when I see one.
While my mind is racing, she says she needs to go on her break. I ask if she wants me to stay. “Whatever you want,” might be the literal Russian translation but the better one is, “Yes, I want to you to stay.”
She goes on her break and an African woman replaces her manning the bar. I ask her for a coffee with some milk, she serves me cream on the side. The African woman’s apartment was just blown up, and she is now homeless. She asks if I know a way out of Israel. I say no. My ex comes back from her break, and I ask her if the orgy thing was bullshit, and she admits she made it all up. Soon after, I go home.
It’s all so tiresome.
I know what you’re thinking now. You want to know if I’m on the market. I was recently seeing someone else, but the war and the sheltering and missile strikes it was like we were in a long distance relationship.
We had a second date planned before things broke out. Then, once the attacks started, we were constantly talking on the phone, watching movies by hitting ‘play’ at the same time. She lives with her parents, and didn’t want to come to my place because she rightfully wanted a proper second date in public. She’s also too afraid to go out and leave her house, not that I can blame her.
At the end of the first week of the war, Homefront Command lifted the most serious restrictions. I was excited we might be able to meet again, but she said the soonest date she could do was more than a week away.
She’s not busy, but she needs the time to “feel comfortable.”
Right as I’m texting her this isn’t working out, we’re called in for a company-wide meeting at the beer plant. We’re furloughed. We have no idea when we’re coming back.
The girl calls me and frantically says she wants to fix things. But she opens with, “I don’t owe you an explanation.”
I reply, “If you feel that way then why are you even calling me.”
She says she’s “learning and going through things” and needs someone who will be there “step-by-step.” That she had her “slut phase” and the phase “wasn’t working for her anymore.” She says I need to be more patient.
I say a date a month is ridiculous and she hasn’t been putting in any effort. That she said she wanted to make things better, but in the course of this call has not offered anything and only asked for more.
She says, calmly, “Everything you’re saying is correct. You’re right.” The conversation drags. The beer plant is putting me on furlough. I haven’t slept. I feel like shit. I can’t do this right now.
I tell her I’m not her practice boyfriend. Click.
There was a certain unearned intimacy from calling each other and checking in during and after each shelter trip. The closeness of crisis. Maybe nothing more.
She knows about my writing, but I doubt she’s reading this. She never asked to see any of it. Honestly, I wish she had asked about my work, about more than just if I’m okay. Nobody’s okay here, exactly.
It’s all so tiresome.