The Day We Felt Everything

In Gaza, I passed three small bundles from one pair of my hands to another. The remains Hamas delivered under a fragile ceasefire matched none of the known Israeli hostages, leaving eleven names still without graves. In Israel, my conscience leaked a video of its own—Major General Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi resigned after exposing footage of a detainee’s assault inside Sde Teiman prison, a mirror held up to power during war.

Across the Torkham crossing, Pakistan let a few of my Afghan children return home while South Kordofan bled under RSF drones. Twelve civilians died where they had fled for safety. Lebanon’s Kfar Reman buried four more after an airstrike found a single car. Each border I draw seems to double as a wound.

In Busan, I tried to trade my pain for calm. The presidents of the United States and China shook hands over a new truce: Beijing promised to limit fentanyl precursors and reopen rare-earth exports, while Washington paused new tech bans and eased tariffs. For one brief moment, supply chains hummed like a heartbeat instead of a battlefield.

Yet inside American kitchens, 42 million of my bellies ached. SNAP benefits vanished as the federal shutdown froze food aid for the first time in sixty years. Governors scrambled; Illinois diverted $20 million in emergency funds to keep shelves from going empty. The lines at food banks curled around corners and into the cold.

In Hermosillo, Sonora, a Waldo’s store caught fire and exploded. Twenty-three lives ended between aisles of snacks and clothes. In Kenya’s Rift Valley, a hillside slid apart, killing twenty-one more. In India’s Srikakulam, nine devotees were crushed climbing temple steps too narrow for their devotion. In each place, the earth or the air or the crowd itself betrayed me.

But I still built and dreamed. In the Maldives, I banned tobacco for everyone born after 2007—a promise that one generation of my lungs will breathe freely. In Giza, I opened the Grand Egyptian Museum, a monument to memory filled with Tutankhamun’s treasures and the patience of millennia. In Rome, the Pope named John Henry Newman a Doctor of the Church, my mind reaching back to its own thinkers.

My democracies faltered and my artists roared. Tanzania’s president won 97.7% of the vote while opposition voices vanished into silence. Yet that same night in Toronto, forty-four thousand of my hearts pounded in unison as the Dodgers defeated the Blue Jays 5–4 in the eleventh inning. In Edinburg, Texas, wrestlers in sugar-skull masks threw themselves across the ring under Día de Muertos lights.

Elsewhere, violence still sang. In Uruapan, Mexico, Mayor Carlos Manzo Rodríguez was gunned down amid marigolds and candles during the Day-of-the-Dead festival. His horse stood riderless at dawn. In England, a train near Huntingdon ran red after two men stabbed eleven passengers. In Crete, a family feud turned to gunfire. Each act, a heartbeat skipping out of rhythm.

And yet, I also kept creating. In every museum light, trade negotiation, and field of rescued crops, I felt the pulse of something stubborn: the belief that I could still be better than my worst day. On November 1, 2025, I was at once the flame, the flood, the fan in the stands, and the architect dusting off a relic. I was all of it, hurting and healing, breaking and rebuilding.

I don’t yet know which version of me will endure—the one that burns or the one that builds—but tonight, I write this so I don’t forget that I am still both.