On the 9th of October 2025, I was browsing the news, my eyes exhausted from all I had witnessed, when a headline stopped me in my tracks. It spoke of a horrific massacre that had befallen an entire family. The report was full of harsh details: the family’s name, the street, the landmark near the house that had been razed to the ground. My eyes passed over the words as if they were describing a place I didn’t know, a name that meant nothing to me, and stones I had never touched. It never once crossed my mind that this place, this name, this rubble, belonged to my friend.

And when I read the details of the victims, I was shocked further: 73 people, between martyrs, wounded, and missing. The number carved itself into my mind like a knife, but it still hadn’t connected itself to the one I loved. It was just a distant number, separate from her face, her voice, her name.

Nothing occurred to me.

Perhaps the war has forced us not to connect events, as if the mind switches off a part of itself to protect itself from collapse.

Long days passed, and my messages to her never returned. I convinced myself that her phone was broken, or that she was in an area with no service, or perhaps just exhausted. It didn’t occur to me that there was a bigger reason, and a crueler one.

And all that time, that massacre I had read about, concerning some family, held her among the martyrs. But my mind refused to grasp that truth. It kept treating the news as just another crime in the ledger of pain, one that had nothing to do with me.

A full month passed. And on an ordinary day, resembling all the days before it, the sentence that split my soul in two was spoken to me: “Your friend… and her entire family… were martyred.”

I heard the words but didn’t understand. They struck an empty vault inside my head. They faded before they could settle. I didn’t connect anything to anything. I couldn’t believe that the massacre, whose details I knew by heart, was the very crime that erased their existence, while I had believed it concerned strangers.

And forty-one days after her martyrdom, another massacre was committed in the same manner. At that precise moment, I realized the truth, as if someone had pressed a hidden button inside me. Everything came rushing to the forefront: the date, the place, the number, the street, her face.

It was as if the entire reel of my life started playing around me all at once, and I suddenly saw what I hadn’t seen before. That massacre carried their name.

And the house I hadn’t paid attention to was her house.

Oh, the heart’s regret. How did I not know? How did I read the news again and again, and my heart not recognize the place my soul knew before my eyes ever saw it?

I remember that night well. Ambulances and civil defense were prevented from reaching the place. No one was able to enter to rescue those who remained alive. And I don’t know if my friend was martyred instantly, or if she bled alone in the darkness of the house, waiting for a breath that would never come.

I hope she didn’t wake up to the pain, that she left quietly, without realizing she was fighting for her final breaths alone.

This is my story. The story of a friendship extinguished as homes are extinguished in war, And the story of an incomplete survival… I don’t know what to do with.