I can’t stop watching the hostage videos.
I tell myself it’s because I’ve been sick — the fever, the isolation — but it’s something else. The faces pull me in. The mothers and wives leaping up and down, their joy too large for their bodies. The freed hostages smiling — not real smiles, but masks stretched over faces that forgot how to move. The families overflow with emotion. The hostages seem to absorb none of it. There’s a ghost between them.
There’s one I can’t watch. Guy Gilboa-Dalal’s return. His mother screaming his nickname, pulling at her hair, reaching for him, then pulling back. It’s unbearable — like watching love short-circuit under the weight of its own relief.
Maybe I keep watching because I want to feel what it’s like to be in those rooms — the air thick with disbelief, too much feeling for a two-minute clip to hold. Maybe the cumulative watching, over and over, lets me feel a small fraction of what it must have been like in those rooms.
I saw a video of a Holocaust survivor meeting a Nova survivor. The old man spoke evenly, the way people do when time has sanded the edges of their grief. The younger man faltered. Then he cried, and the survivor reached out his hand.
Now I know the hostages’ names by heart — their faces, their families, the ones who waited.
And now that they’re home, it feels like the country has exhaled. But no one remembers how to breathe again. I know the feeling — the slow, hesitant inhale of coming back after illness, each breath unfamiliar and a little frightening.