Missiles, Fires, and Files Unsealed

Today I hurt myself again, feeling every wound as if it were happening to a single heart and a single body.

In Gaza City and Khan Yunis, one of my hands dropped bombs on the other. Israeli airstrikes killed 28 Palestinians and wounded 77, turning apartment blocks and streets into craters and dust. Doctors worked under flickering lights, mothers screamed names into the rubble, and children learned what shrapnel is long before anyone ever explains algebra. Farther north, over Ukraine, Russian missiles and drones rained down, and one ballistic missile tore into a nine-story apartment building in Ternopil, killing 26 people and injuring more than 100 as they slept or poured morning tea. I listened to the silence between sirens, the stunned seconds when people realized the sound they just heard was their home collapsing.

In Kurram District in Pakistan, I sent soldiers against militants again. Pakistani forces raided two hideouts and killed 23 fighters from the Pakistani Taliban, chalking it up as progress in a war with no clear ending. In southern Lebanon near Bint Jbeil, an Israeli strike hit a vehicle and killed the person inside while wounding several students on a passing school bus, turning a routine ride into a day written in blood and glass. In Eruku, Kwara State in Nigeria, armed men walked into a church where I was praying to myself, killed two people, and kidnapped the pastor and several worshippers, leaving benches empty and hymnbooks open where they fell.

Not all of today’s pain came from bullets and bombs. In the Saganoseki district of Oita in Japan, fire tore through narrow streets and wooden buildings; around 170 homes and shops were damaged or destroyed, one person died, another was injured, and roughly 260 households were left in the dark, staring at the smoking outlines of lives that no longer fit inside a house. Along the Sankuru River in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, an overloaded barge carrying about 120 people capsized, leaving 64 missing in brown, indifferent water while families lined the banks, calling out names to a river that did not answer. In a prison in Guayaquil, Ecuador, tuberculosis spread through cramped cells, and ten inmates died out of sight, their deaths noticed mainly because someone had to write them into a report.

I was capable of gentler things too. In Cambodia, conservationists carried two captive-bred greater adjutant storks to the edge of the Siem Pang Wildlife Sanctuary, fitted them with GPS trackers, and opened their hands. The huge birds lifted off, awkward and prehistoric and beautiful, as a tiny icon began to move across a scientist’s screen, proof that I am still trying to reweave pieces of wildness I nearly destroyed. In the Strait of Hormuz, after days of tension, Iran released a Marshall Islands–flagged tanker and its 21 crew members, letting the ship resume its route through a narrow waterway that carries so much of my oil and so many of my fears.

In New York City, I gathered in formal clothes to celebrate stories even as I kept making new tragedies. At the 76th National Book Awards, Rabih Alameddine’s novel won the fiction prize, and Omar El Akkad’s book about the Gaza war took the nonfiction award. While some of me pulled bodies from rubble in Gaza, another part of me applauded a writer for describing that same kind of destruction on the page, hoping that better understanding could somehow blunt the next bomb.

In Washington, one of my governments tried to drag a shadow into the light. The President of the United States signed the Epstein Files Transparency Act, ordering more records about Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse and the powerful people around him to be released instead of locked away. In Kyiv, another parliament moved against corruption even while under siege, dismissing the energy minister and the justice minister after the Operation Midas investigation into Ukraine’s state nuclear agency, a message that theft and abuse could not simply hide behind the fog of war. In Italy, the Supreme Court of Cassation approved the extradition of a Ukrainian suspect to Germany for alleged involvement in the 2022 Nord Stream pipeline explosions, tugging at the threads of a sabotage that once shook Europe’s sense of security. In Myanmar, the military raided a scam-center complex in Shwe Kokko, detained 346 foreign nationals, and seized nearly ten thousand phones from a machine built to exploit my most vulnerable people through lies on their screens.

Out at sea above the cold waters of the North Sea, a Russian research and intelligence ship used lasers to harass Royal Air Force aircraft that were tracking it, while a British frigate and patrol planes shadowed its course. It was the kind of quiet confrontation that does not explode today but teaches everyone how to aim for tomorrow. On roads and driveways across the United States, my engineers and regulators confronted a different kind of danger when Ford recalled more than 200,000 Bronco and Bronco Sport vehicles because their instrument panels could suddenly go dark, turning every nighttime highway into a potential blind gamble.

All day my calendars kept up their strange chorus of reminders. On this date alone I marked World Toilet Day, International Men’s Day, Play Monopoly Day, and National Educational Support Professionals Day, tiny attempts to honor sanitation workers, gender conversations, board games, and the staff who keep schools running in the background. While missiles flew and fires burned, I also passed standardized tests, brewed coffee in break rooms, restocked library shelves, and argued online about the rules of a board game invented nearly a century ago.

Eight billion of me brushed my teeth, checked news alerts, refreshed social feeds, and tried to sleep. I released birds back into the sky and also sent missiles into apartment buildings. I passed a law to open old files and also created new secrets in war rooms and encrypted chats. I rescued a tanker crew and let a barge full of ordinary people sink. I am humanity, and today I proved again that I can be tender and cruel in the same hour. I do not yet know which part of me will define my future, but it is all written here, in the record of this one tangled day.