Day 56

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I cross the day off my calendar as I take a deep breath and fill my lungs with stale but relatively safe air.

“I can do this.” I prepared myself emotionally and physically to open the door and step out of my bedroom closet. I could hear the news blaring from the living room TV. “Another air strike on Palestine. Israel lands airstrikes in search of Hamas leaders.” I can hear clearly now that I’m fully awake. Distracted, I pull up TikTok. At this point I don’t even need to search Palestine, the feed comes right up. The algorithm knows my mania well. It knows exactly how to reach that itch in the back of my mind. Hours upon hours of searching for the real news, the unfiltered truth. Reading through comments, thousands at a time. “Share this, the world needs to know!” They did, so I complied, every single time.

My Instagram stories have gone from picnics and work from home routines to a live Palestine news ticker. I had to share it. The airstrikes, the dead babies, the lies. The world needs to know the truth.

I’ve naively been safe in my house. Thinking the world will resolve itself until I realized, it wasn’t. Our country was just going to let us witness this genocide. I couldn’t believe it. Days turned into nights of me buried in research. Fifty-six days, that’s how long I‘ve been in my house. I don’t know when but at some point, I realized that our news was just blatantly lying to us and I just couldn’t get over it.

The ABC news I grew up watching, the political debate on CNN, it was all a lie. Somehow I got tapped into Palestine TikTok and started seeing the real news. The real coverage. The real lies. If the government can flat out lie like this in this day and age of mass information, I knew it was just a matter of time before it was us. When would it be us?

The day I asked myself that question was the last day I left my house. At first I thought it was healthy. Summer was winding down, guns were about, “this is fine,” I thought. But then the nightly rabbit holes began. Everything I saw on the news, I had to double check and get the facts. I was on Reddit and TikTok for hours every night until the early hours of the morning and the more I did, the less safe I felt. “They killed Breonna Taylor in her house, lied about it, and the cops got off.” I saw as I scrolled. Deciding then that I should pull the curtains I usually left open for more security. They never opened back up. As days went on, I retreated further and further into my house. No longer going out to the living, fear of “too much exposure.” I thought as I moved my work station into my bedroom.

After the first month work was getting in the way of my deep dives, my civil duties to inform the American people of the truth. I became too paranoid for zoom meetings, thinking that the government was watching. Streaming our meetings in their security offices, knowing that I was finding out what they were hiding. Somehow I was put on medical leave. “Great, this is safer.” I thought. I unplugged my laptop, making sure to let the battery die in fear of surveillance.

The doorknob. It peeked from my peripheral as I looked up from my phone. “Right. Food.” I heard my stomach growl over the TikTok playing in the background. I grabbed the closet door knob. My bedroom closet was now the only place I felt mildly safe, but its been two days and I’ve eaten all my snacks. I haven’t showered in days and my bladder is spasming from trying to hold in my pee for so long. I have to open this door.

“Israel bombed a hospital marked as a civilian safety zone after hundreds of civilians were instructed to go there for cover. There were no HAMAs discovered upon the rebel.” I immediately lifted my phone back up. My heart started pounding. I scrambled from the door to the other side of the closet and pinned myself hard against the wall. My bladder released. I slid down the wall, sat there and plugged my phone to its charger. With my clothes still warm from my urine, I shared the story, clicked on the comment section and started reading.

I slid down the wall and my bladder released. I sat there, clothes still warm from my own urine and plugged my phone into its charger. Sitting there, I shared.