Proof of Life

What it's like living in a city that's getting bombed

Sorry about the crappy picture. We’re trying to stay away from the windows.

I’ve been living Doha, Qatar, about 100 miles across the Gulf from Iran, for the better part of a year now. Long enough to stop flinching at every geopolitical headline. Long enough, apparently, to have developed a kind of strange intimacy with the idea of something happening—while still finding it nearly impossible to believe that it actually would.

You should understand, despite the region, Doha itself feels sleepy. Sort of like a half-empty luxury cruise ship. But like a cruise ship, stuff happens here. There are storms, people fall off, people get arrested in foreign ports—you get the picture.

The night before the bombing commenced, a group of us got together for dinner. We didn’t say it out loud in so many words, but we all knew what the evening was. One more night of sameness. One more night of the way things were, before whatever came next. None of us were actually sure anything would come next, but we all had that niggling feeling that pinches as the back of your neck.

Regardless, we had a lovely time. We ate Polish food and drank Italian wine. We talked about the ever-expanding definition of trauma, of all things.

The next morning I came home from the gym, peeled off my sweaty headphones, and my husband Jack looked up at me from where he was sitting.

“It started,” he said.

I knew exactly what he meant.

That was Saturday — yesterday, as I’m writing this. The day unfolded in the way these days do now, in the age of group texts and smartphones: a strange, scrolling chorus of the mundane and the surreal running alongside each other, indistinguishable.

I’m grateful for you and our wonderful dinner last night.

Please remain vigilant against scammers. May attempt to obtain your QID by claiming it’s for required evacuation procedures.

It’s amazing how fast scammers work.

Never waste an opportunity to divest someone of their money.

Oh, more explosions!

windows shaking

Jesus

It’s a good job we had dinner last night.

Was just thinking the same.

Our doors are always open.

same here.

Then came the texts from our children, and family, and friends back home:

Proof of life, please.

OMG, what’s going on?

Are you safe?

This is scary.

God Bless You.

I noticed the difference between those two threads. The expats were dark and wry and already onto the scammers within the hour. Our people back home were frightened in a way we couldn't do much about—they were scared for us, and we were busy being fine (whatever that means). Fear looks different when you’re inside the thing versus watching it from far away. Neither version is wrong. They just don’t quite speak the same language.

That evening we went to a friend’s place in our apartment building. Drinks, cheese and crackers—thank goodness we’d stocked up on wine before Ramadan, when such things are verboten. We sat together and talked about how quickly life can change, watching what might have been drones or military planes or helicopters—we genuinely couldn’t tell—blink in and out of the night sky. We talked about how not to unduly alarm our friends’ middle-school-aged son. We debated, seriously and at some length, whether we should drag our mattresses to interior rooms in case any windows broke during the night.

We decided against it, in the end.

Our friends’ son slept in his parents’ bed. Jack and I went home and slept in ours—although my chivalrous husband quietly took my side, the one next to the window.

“You owe me one,” he said, joking.

I went in and out of sleep most of the night, listening to the bombs going off like it was the Fourth of July. Distant. Rhythmic. Almost familiar.

Almost.

The morning hasn’t been much different. Some streaks in the sky. Some booming sounds. The birds are absolutely losing their minds. And of course, the news that the Ayatollah had been killed in one of the strikes.

Hopeful, it seems. Though I’ll be honest—I don’t know enough about how power actually works in Iran to say with any confidence. It might be like a game of whack-a-mole. One Ayatollah goes down, another pops up, angrier and better organized.

What I can say, from living here: there’s no love for war. But there’s no love lost for Iran either. And most of what gets reported back home—from the right, from the left, it doesn’t much matter—is incomplete at best. The Gulf is not a simple place, and the gap between the headlines and the reality on the ground is wider than most people realize.

There are other things you’d never know unless you were here, and not all of them are political. The skies today are overcast, for instance. Unusual. It almost looks as if it might rain—which is even more unusual in one of the most arid places on earth. Except that in this part of the world, missiles are sometimes fired into the atmosphere for meteorological purposes, to seed clouds and induce rainfall. The Iranian missiles and the Patriots sent to intercept them obviously weren’t fired with irrigation in mind. But the physics don’t much care about intention. We may get rain. We may even get a flood.

There’s a metaphor in there somewhere. I’ll leave it alone.

Tonight, Jack and I return the favor. We’ve invited our friends and neighbors over — drinks and nibbles, same as last night, same as it will probably be tomorrow. We’ll sit together and talk about the day. Process what we can. Watch the sky if we feel like it.

One more night of being together, which is the only sane response I know to any of this. You find your people. You open your doors. You pour something worth drinking and you talk until it starts to feel, if not normal, then at least like something you're inside of rather than something you’re watching happen to you.

The sameness is the point. It always was.