Dream Dust

My youngest child calls out in the night. He wants another drink. He needs a band-aid. He’s too hot under his sheet. He’s too cold with the fan on. Can I get him a fuzzy blanket? Will his father peek at him when he gets home?

I don’t try too hard to ease him back to sleep. At any moment, the air raid sirens might blare, and we will have to bundle him up and take him to the safe room before the missiles come. We are on our fourth night of this bleak routine.

He calls me back to his room. His toy dog fell out of the bed, so I pick it up and tuck it in next to him. Will I turn on his night light? Can I sprinkle him with more dream dust? His finger hurts SO bad and it’s even BLEEDING a little. He whimpers in that annoying way children do when they are completely exhausted.

I imagine him bleeding so much that I can’t kiss it away. I imagine him trapped in rubble.

I can’t bring myself to be too firm with him. I don’t know how long we have.

Everything could be fine. Everything could end tonight.

The Midrash says that when we wandered in the desert on our way to this land, liberated from Egypt but not yet home, we dug graves and lay down in them. Only those who woke in the morning continued the journey.

Every night, the missiles come and the sirens shriek.

Every morning, the news reports the names of those who did not make it through the night.

Every afternoon, dread grows as the sky darkens.

Outside our front door, the giant agave cactus shoots up a flowering stalk, the first and last of its life-cycle. My older son has trained a time-lapse camera on its progress. Soon, the mother plant will die, and the blooms on its massive stem will fill our front garden with new growth. It will take months.

My phone blinks with a notification that the threat of incoming missiles has passed for the moment. I stand outside in the cool Jerusalem night and look up at the agave stalk. I want to watch it complete its process. I want months. I want years.

I want to get annoyed with my children without imagining their imminent deaths. I want to visit my family in America without getting stranded by war or harassed by extremists. I want to exist alongside my neighbors without fear or suspicion. I want to be freed from impossible choices. I want to live.