Mom begging me to ditch my dead-end adjunct job in Jerusalem and come home before Iran gets directly involved in all this.
Part of me really wants to leave but I can't. There are people here I've grown close to and leaving now would feel like betrayal. Some of them are colleagues and in that context it would literally be a betrayal of my commitments, however understandable.
Additionally, a nontrivial number of people from my social circle in Montreal are posting #fromtherivertothesea on their locked instagram accounts. I don't want to see them ever again, least of all now.
There's also the matter of getting a chance to experience WW3 in a city that was represented on old maps as the navel and the center of the world, the point of convergence for everything that happens. If you have what is sometimes referred to as "a sense of history," however ironic, it's pretty cool. Like my own highbrow version of Twitter legend Lord Miles's danger tourism.
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