Emerson Howitt

The Eleventh Time I Survived This morning, I was on my way to the north of Gaza, heading through the slow, broken veins of a city that has forgotten how to breathe. The car moved sluggishly, weighed down by the silence of those inside it and the ache of a land too familiar with grief. I was not alone—two sat in front, and beside me in the back, two others leaned into the stillness of the journey. We had barely passed a group of people standing near us—faces I would never know—when the sky cracked open. An explosion erupted without warning. It was not just a sound. It was a force that tore through the air and rewrote reality in an instant. My ears rang violently, like something inside them had burst. Smoke swallowed the world. I couldn't see. I couldn’t think. Only instinct remained. The car lurched forward suddenly. It had been hit. The rear was shattered, the windows blown out. The metallic taste of dust and blood filled my mouth. Around me, chaos took shape in color: red. Blood everywhere. On the windows. On the seats. On me. The men beside me were both injured—one slumped, the other writhing. The driver, too, was wounded. And the passenger next to him. I screamed—raw, desperate, disbelieving.
“Are you okay? Is anyone hurt?”
But I already knew. I should’ve checked myself. I should’ve asked if I was still whole. But instead, I reached for the small medical kit strapped to my waist. My hands worked on autopilot, pulling gauze, pressing wounds, whispering frantic words to the barely-conscious. We reached a nearby hospital—just a few hundred meters away, yet it felt like another world. We stumbled out, drenched in blood and terror. Inside the hospital, I was met not with relief, but with more devastation. More bodies. More cries. The wounded kept coming. The dead, too. I began to document. To help. To do anything but collapse. It was horrific. Unspeakable.
And I survived. Again. This was the eleventh time. Eleven times I’ve come back from the edge since this war began. Eleven times I’ve been granted a breath while others had theirs stolen. I wonder how. How am I still alive, when so many are not? How many more times will I get to ask that question? I no longer sleep—just fall into nightmares disguised as rest. Every dream is soaked in fire and sirens. Every heartbeat echoes with the screams I’ve heard and the ones I’ve tried to silence. Today, I was simply on my way to work—to document the shattered lives that remain. But the story I sought became my own. Again. And I don’t know how to carry it anymore.