Just like there are all kinds of trouble, there are all kinds of tired. This morning, I am the kind of tired that comes after six – count them, six – trips to the shelter. But now the shelter is just one floor down, in a private home, with two old friends and their son.

I got rescued. Strung out, in need of some perspective and course correction, I had called an old friend for whom I’d cat-sat in 2015, and out-of-the-blue, she invited me to wait out the war at her new home in Rehovot; a private home that had a spare room with ensuite, and a mamad* one floor down in the basement. Too strung out to decide, I spent another sleepless night in my 8-floors-down Jerusalem building miklat** with 60 others. Then, despite my fears of how to safely get to Rehovot, I said yes. After packing a bag and dressing to lay on the ground in case of missile attack en route, I watched on my phone as my friend’s husband, L, drove to Jerusalem to pick me up from our garage. It felt like a surreptitious Mossad operation — “Operation Yehudit” — L driving as-quickly-as-the law-allows, calmly reassuring me that I was safe, that given the timing of earlier missile attacks, one was unlikely in the upcoming hour; but, if there were an attack, he knew how to find a furrow to shelter.

Three Rescue pastilles later, we arrived and I exhaled, because this was real shelter; not just the beautiful home with the accessible mamad, but people who wanted me, who cared about me enough to invite me into their home to shelter with them. The stress rolled off my shoulders like rain from a roof. I slept, even after successive sirens, and woke up feeling…normal.

What does “normal” feel like in wartime, you ask?

This, I think: Tired.

*private safe room in a single home

**traditional bomb shelter shared by entire building or neighborhood

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)