This piece of metal (image removed) is fragment of a massive explosion that landed on my room’s balcony in 2013. I was laying on my bed next to a wall-sized glass door. I always sat there and let my body get soaked in the subtle sunlight, as I watched the clouds moving in the sky in a swaying rythme. I would lay on my back and imagine as if gravity is reversed and the blue sky is my ground; a thought I was often amused by. I felt so lucky being able to watch the sky from my own bed and more clearly and vividly, from my balcony. The sky might’ve been at some point the most exciting thing in that lifeless town I called Home.
Dark starry nights with a book and a cup of tea. Calm breezy nights with my mom and I discussing “One hundred years of solitude“ by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and laughing like our struggles ceased to exist. Laying on my bed that morning, sinking into my blanket, feeling as light as a feather in the softness of its texture, gently closing my eye, my thoughts at peace and my body caressed by the mellow Autumn sun rays. In what felt like splits of a second, a deafening explosion sound spurted followed by a ringing in my ears, and a glass door, now in shatters, submerging my blanket. My room had instantly filled up with an insane amount of dust. My first thoughts were that a missile landed on the building and it was doomed to collapse, putting my life to an end. But I was sitting on steady grounds, while my thoughts went as bleak as my foggy room that resembled what I imagined appeared behind the doorway to the afterlife. Luckily, the building was not collapsing, and I was still very much alive. I heard people’s screams and soonly discovered that it was a bombed car. I looked out of the window and saw blood streaming down the street. At that point, I had never seen blood, or at least not that tremendous amount of it. Shards of metal flew, scattered, and landed everywhere. It killed my next-door neighbour. It struck him right in his brain while he was standing on his balcony. This particular piece wanted me dead and could’ve gotten me, but it didn’t. I can never be certain if it’s by luck that I am alive and well, but I thought that my ultimate privilege was that my family and I were safe at that moment. Life in the years of war had felt like a video game setting. You wake up, you go outside, you get things done, you survive or it’s game over. Death was very unpredicted and abrupt. You could lose your life while buying groceries, taking the bus to school, walking down the street.. the possibilities are endless because death had no pattern. Staying safe was some sort of a tactic. It was a carefully planned strategy that people followed to carry out their daily tasks with minimum risks involved. I remember during that time period I’d been reading Cosmos by Carl Sagan. I especially loved reading it on my balcony around midnight when I felt safer and the city had gone to sleep. The glistening of the star-filled sky amplified my teenage excitement about the vast universe I’m navigating with my curious and naive adolescent mind. You’d think that living through a near-death experience might’ve left me feeling unsettled and terrified, but I don’t remember feeling much of anything at all. In a place where war and instability are the norm, working your way through it strategically is also the norm, and adaptation is the key word to survival. That day, me and my family stayed in the first floor of the building gathering the courage to get back up. Hours went by and our inquietude decreased. I walked up the stairs, got back to the apartment, and into my room. I collected this fragment that failed its purpose. I collected the glass shatters, cleaned the floor, changed my bed sheets, and fell asleep in a naked room, where the moonlight shone brighter.
pale blue fragments 