“Do you want to watch another episode?” I asked.

She is in the bed by my side, curled up into a ball. We haven’t left the room since yesterday. The blinds are down and I have no idea what time it is. All I know is that this was about the tenth episode we’ve watched in a row. Season seven of Game of Thrones. Maybe we’ll get to finish the show before I leave Mexico tomorrow, but something’s wrong. She hasn’t said anything in a while. There’s clearly something on her mind. Maybe she wants to fight. We’ve only fought once before, during a trip to Mexico City, when I didn’t let her take care of me while I was sick. I was feeling feverish and had to sit down and she insisted — almost begged — that I take medicine she had in her bag, but I refused. I dislike taking pills, and I like people doing things for me even less so. Let me be, I told her, I don’t need you to take care of me. She didn’t like that one bit. As we wandered through Chapultepec Park I could hear her boiling like a teapot about to whistle. 

I don’t want to talk. I know that whatever conversation she’d want to have will be a serious one and I don’t feel like being serious. I’ll have enough time for that once I get back home. Just don’t talk. Let me hold on to this peace now, while I can. Don’t make this harder than it has to be.

I reach over to check my phone like I always do when I’m nervous, which is another thing I dislike but can’t help. The pull is too strong. The escape from my own thoughts that the endless stream of content grants is as sweet as opium, and ever since the seventh the craving for it has only grown more insatiable. Before, the app used to mostly show me horny-clickbait, luring me to subscribe to some random girl’s only-fans account. Now it’s all about people who hate me. You might think this would be a turn-off, but it only makes me want to scroll even more. I want to be shocked by their hate. I want to be hurt by all the lies they tell. I want to be enraged by their self-righteous ignorance. And at the same time I make a conscious effort to take that kind of content lightly, otherwise I’ll go insane. It’s all a joke anyway. It’s as if, with their mob-fueled anger, they cast me as some Hollywood villain: The evil Israeli child-murderer. What fucking nonsense. I click on the reels tab and the first video comes up. A video of huge crowds of people in an American city calling to globalize the intifada. An interviewer asks some of the protesters what “intifada” means and they don’t know. Ha ha. Then another video of a young girl sitting in front of the camera, saying that all zionists are pigs. Funny. An Egyptian man wearing a keffiyeh explaining calmly that all the horrors of the seventh of October never happened. What a bundle of joy, this little gadget is. Yet I can’t look away. I could’ve gone on much longer but Carolina’s voice tore me away from the screen.

“What does it say?”

“What?”

“You’re checking the news, right?”

“Yeah”

“Anything new?”

“No, not really.”

“So,” she said, “what do you want to do?”

“Nothing.”

“Really? Baby, this is your last day in Mexico. Are you sure you don’t want to do anything in the outside world?” 

“No baby, I’m alright just staying here with you,” I say to her.

I gave up on trying to explain the war to Carolina. Not that I tried that hard, but one morning as we were eating breakfast she told me about a story she read on the bombing of a hospital in Gaza. 

“I just can’t imagine what it’s like for those poor people,” she said.

“Yes, but–” I said, and was about to continue, but I realized that there was nothing I could say that would’ve made her understand reality as I saw it. She, who has been living her whole life on the other side of the planet and knows nothing of the war I was trapped in my whole life. I tried once to explain the conflict to a Mexican friend. I asked him what he knew of it. ‘Aren’t you killing each other over Jesus or something?’ he asked me. That eliminated most of my motivation. How could I have explained to Carolina about the nature of the cycle of violence I was born into, when all she had to see on TV were pictures of Palestinians being bombed and hospitals being raided?

But did I want her to understand? I never bothered to ask whether she had an opinion. Maybe she did. I didn’t want to know. That was a minefield better left un-trodden, I decided. It was better to  push all of that stuff away while I’m with her.

But the last words she said, ‘the outside world,’ came out with a slight laughter that made me wish I could sit her down in a chair and force her to watch Hamas horror footage for an hour. Maybe then she’ll understand that for me, and many others, the world has stopped. We’re living through a day that has been lasting for more than a month now. The date has not changed, It’s still October seventh. But nobody here cares. They all go along with their merry lives as if nothing happened. And I couldn’t care less about anything that happened in their world. At least it’s not as bad here as in other places. From all the videos I watch on Instagram I can’t help but get the sense that those Europeans all fucking hate us. That they want to see us die. They’re all crying for the poor civilians now, but when it was us who were dying they couldn’t stop cheering. All those cultured, refugee-loving Europeans. I wonder how many of my classmates in the exchange program were already cheering on the seventh. There was one girl that posted something pro-Palestinian as news of the massacre broke, who I thought was cool right up until then. We got along well. Thank god I haven’t seen her since, I wouldn’t have been able to stand the sight of her. All of them, a bunch of fucking— 

“Okay,” she said, “then put on the next episode.”

“Great,” I answered, “one more and we’re done with season seven.”

I feel as if I’ve known Carolina for much longer than I actually do. It’s almost bizarre to think how accidental our meeting was. We both attended a friend’s birthday party. People were dancing salsa: a dance that I only know the most basic moves of. I was alone, so was she, and I just came over and took her by the hand over to the dance floor. 

We only exchanged about five sentences beforehand, yet some force compelled me to move as if my feet were on rails. We had been spending time together ever since and after the seventh, when I retreated to this little sanctuary away from the word, she joined me. The only person that I cared for in this foreign land. We would cook for each other, watch television and have sex, all things that we enjoyed doing together. I was satisfied to be stuck there together, rotting away in a dark little room. And when I managed to push everything out of my mind and pretend that nothing bad ever happened, I was happy.

When I told her I was called to serve in the reserves it brought her to tears. Her voice became hoarse as she begged me not to leave her, said that I shouldn’t go and fight, but I told her that I had to. She didn’t say anything but continued to plead with her eyes. “Don’t go,” she would sometimes say out of the blue. And the more she said it, the more I thought that maybe I really shouldn’t go. Maybe I’ll just wash my phone down the toilet and allow her to take care of me, and we’ll stay like this for a year, or forever.

She is peaceful now, wearing her pink pajamas and her black hair loose, her big brown eyes staring at the screen. My morose mood seemed to have swept over her. I pull her close to me, One hand on her stomach and the fingers of the other slowly tracing over the soft skin of her breast.

“What are you doing baby?” she whispers. I inhale the light, coconut scent of  her hair like it’s the last bit of oxygen on earth as I slide my hand down toward her crotch.

“Do you want me to stop?” I whisper back.

She begins to quiver and her breath grows heavy. “No.”

I slide out of my underwear and yank her pink pajama pants down. She wiggles out of them and I pull her hips closer to mine. She turns her head to kiss me as I enter her and for a few minutes there really is nothing in the world — in the whole universe even — but her, until we both are done and separate. 

After a moment of rest she gets off the bed and goes over to the bathroom.

The front page of Ynet has a new cover story: The testimonies of the sexual assault on the seventh. When did I pick up my phone again? It just appeared in my hand. Swallowed me whole before I noticed. I skim through words, lightly tapping my screen, until my eyes halt upon a passage. ‘I was hiding in the bushes for some time when I saw them bring a young girl. There were five or six of them. They started to—”

“Let’s keep going,” Carolina says, sitting back down on the bed beside me.

“Baby, I’m not sure I can… oh, you meant the TV.”

She gives me a curious look. “Is something wrong?”

“No. Why do you ask?”

“I don’t know. you look a little angry.”

I smile. “Everything is fine, don’t worry baby.”

The phone is still in my hand. I wait for Carolina to be distracted by the TV and go back to reading. I read paragraph after excruciating paragraph.

“Oh my god!” Carolina exhales, “I can’t believe Daenerys just did that! did you see?”

“Yes, it’s crazy.”

I’m done reading the article. King’s landing is on fire. I put my phone away and the only question that is left on my mind is, what am I supposed to do with the knowledge that I live in a world that is so evil? The world has never been so dark.

It is night and we are laying in bed together, falling asleep. My left arm is under her neck and she is curled up into a ball on the other side of the bed like she was earlier. I try to pull her close to spoon her but she resists, so I give up and lay on my back. 

“Is this it?” she asks me without turning to face me. “After you go back, it’s over?”

“Yes,” I answer, and it feels like pulling the pin on a grenade.

She gets quiet for a while until she says, “Why did you take my hand that day, at the party?”

“Because I wanted to,” I answer.

She doesn’t talk for a while. I lift myself up to see her face thinking something might be wrong just as a tear rolls down her eye.

“Next time,” she replies, “please, don’t do it. Next time you leave me alone.”

Why did I do it? Why did I take her hand that day at the party and took her to dance? Probably because I thought I had nothing to lose. And yet, I’ve lost something. Once I leave, I’ll be less than what I was before I met her.

“Okay, baby.” I say, “as you wish.”