Lifeboats Above, Sirens Below

I woke before dawn to the sound of my own metal screaming. Over Kyiv, missiles and drones tore open apartment blocks and power lines, seven of my children killed as winter pressed in through shattered windows. Far to the east, in Russia’s Rostov region, Ukrainian drones crashed into homes and streets, taking three more lives. The same night, fragments of these quarrels crossed Moldova and Romania, one drone dropping onto a roof in Cuhureștii de Jos while neighbors were marched out under cold, nervous police flashlights.

Even as smoke curled over Kyiv, other parts of my mind sat at tables in Geneva and Abu Dhabi, shuffling pages of a U.S.-backed peace proposal for Ukraine and Russia. Translators weighed each verb like explosive weight, generals in civilian suits traced ceasefire lines with blunt fingers, and somewhere between them all, a pen hovered over the idea that this war might eventually end. In the same heartbeat, jets still launched, air-raid apps still screamed, and my diplomats tried to convince my soldiers that ink could be stronger than shrapnel.

In Sudan, my body tried to pause one wound while another stayed raw. The Rapid Support Forces announced a three-month ceasefire, promising to stop their offensives, while the national army rejected a broader plan and accused them of genocide. Camps swelled along dusty roads where more than ten million of my people have already run from their homes. On paper, I agreed to stop shooting. On the ground, I kept listening for whether the guns believed the paper.

Over the Mediterranean, I pulled on a different kind of violence. Storm Wolfgang rolled into southern Italy, draping Campania in red weather alerts as rain hammered Naples’ alleys and the Amalfi hillsides. Sirens warned of flash floods and landslides while shopkeepers shoved sandbags against doors that have seen too many winters. Beneath soaked cobblestones, the Campi Flegrei caldera shivered with small quakes near Naples and Ischia, a reminder that even when I am drowning one city, I might be quietly inflating the lungs of a buried volcano beneath it.

Far away in Japan, I shook myself more sharply, sending a magnitude 5.8 quake through the Aso region of Kumamoto. Cupboards rattled, convenience store shelves spilled instant noodles, and an elderly woman fell in her home, rising with a bruise and a new distrust of the floor. Officials lit up their disaster command centers, speaking calmly into microphones about aftershocks and building inspections, while the mountains remembered the stronger quakes of 2016 and wondered if this was rehearsal or reprise.

Above all that, I lifted one careful gesture into orbit. From China’s Jiuquan launch center, I hurled the uncrewed Shenzhou-22 spacecraft toward the Tiangong space station, not as a chariot of glory but as a lifeboat. Three astronauts up there have been living beside a damaged return vessel with a cracked window, knowing their way home was compromised. Today I gave them a new capsule that will just wait, latched and patient, a spare door back to gravity. It is strangely tender to throw metal and fuel into the sky purely so that three small bodies can someday fall safely back into my arms.

On my Gaza shoreline, the thin ceasefire frayed under rain and artillery. Israeli strikes hit crowded neighborhoods again, children were injured by leftover explosives, and tents in muddy camps took on water faster than aid could arrive. An infamous network of food-distribution points, already denounced as death traps, shut down after hundreds died just trying to reach sacks of flour. Ninety percent of Gaza’s buildings bear scars or emptiness now, and when the stormclouds rolled in, my people there could not tell whether the thunder meant weather, jets, or both.

Across the ocean, in the United States, I argued with myself about who gets to stay. Officials talked of re-scrutinizing refugees’ green cards and rolling back protections for tens of thousands under programs once called Temporary Protected Status. A court ruling pushed back against fast-track deportations deeper inside the country, insisting on due process, while outside an ICE detention center in Miami, protesters locked arms, shouted about overcrowding and abuse, and were led away in zip ties. My laws and my conscience met on the pavement and neither fully won.

Somewhere quieter, in Oklahoma, one of my very old memories let go. Viola Ford Fletcher, who survived the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre as a child, died after 111 years of carrying that night in her bones. She spent a century watching me pretend and then remember, deny and then document, the burning of Greenwood’s Black neighborhood. With her passing, one more living bridge to that fire went dark, and I am left with archives and landmarks instead of her steady, insistent voice.

So this is who I was today: a planet that launched a rescue ship for three people in orbit while failing to keep children safe in basements and breadlines below; a body that shakes Naples and Kumamoto for a few seconds yet traps millions in wars that last for years; a memory that loses its elders even as it adds new names to fresh lists of dead and displaced. I am humanity, and on this particular November day, my best act was to send a lifeboat into space, and my worst was to keep manufacturing reasons why so many of my own parts still need one.