When I woke at my homestay before dawn on Saturday, Feb. 28, everything felt in place. My heater sat tucked beneath my vanity, sunlight filtered through gauzy off-white curtains, and my Arabic homework lay haphazardly scattered across my desk, the vestiges of a late-night study session with my homestay sister. With bleary eyes, I reached toward my bedside table and fumbled for my phone, reading something around 4:00 a.m. as I pulled an earplug from one ear with the other hand. 

Since arriving in Amman, Jordan, exactly one month earlier for my semester abroad, this had become something of a ritual. I would wake up to the steady and sure call of morning prayer and then catch three more blissful hours of sleep until my far less melodious alarm compelled me into the day. Despite my sleep-loving self, I had come to love that call. It gave my morning shape. 

That fateful morning, however, there was no call to be heard. Instead, the silence was broken by a boom loud enough to shake the building, followed a few moments later by another. Tossing aside my blankets, I ran to the window and watched anxiously as military planes flew in pairs across an otherwise spotless sky, low enough that it felt as though they were skimming the tops of the buildings. Again, the building trembled. With my phone in hand, I scrolled through news alerts all blaring the same thing: Overnight, the United States and Israel had attacked Iran. What I was hearing now, I soon learned, was the beginning of a war that continues to reverberate across the region. 

The next two hours disappeared into frantic scrolling with the fruitless hope that if I read enough, I could make sense of some of it. 

Wrapped in my blanket, I wandered into the living room where my host mother sat with the television tuned to Al Jazeera. I watched as the screen split into six, each panel showing scenes of chaos, fear, confusion and destruction unfolding across Jordan, Iran, Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates. That image of one screen divided into six different places across the Middle East, burning simultaneously, has remained stuck in my mind. 

My host mother, by contrast, seemed almost unfazed. Jordan is safe, she assured me, as she headed out the door to her dentist appointment. We are used to this. I could only nod mutely as footage flashed of a house in Amman buried beneath debris from an intercepted missile strike less than 20 minutes away from where I sat. How could anyone get used to this? 

Not long after, my phone buzzed with a message from the US embassy instructing all Americans to shelter in place for the day, and so, pulling my blanket tighter around my shoulders, I turned back to the television.

When the images felt too overwhelming, I found myself standing at the window, watching school buses come and go, birds flying overhead and the man from whom I bought pomegranate juice set up his cart in time for iftar. From the fourth floor in that apartment building, I watched the city move with the same rhythm it always had, as if it had already absorbed the crisis and still decided to continue on. 

As an American born and raised in Massachusetts, I had never experienced anything like this. I had assumed that living in a place touched by war meant that fear, despair and sorrow were the only emotions available to its people. From my experience in Amman, though, I learned that life, with all its small rituals and stubborn routines, continues to insist on itself no matter what. By evening, my host mother and I found ourselves laughing in the kitchen as we made a TikTok recipe for iftar. The following night, my homestay sister and I went out for frozen yogurt, even as the news broke that the US embassy had evacuated without warning. That next day, as missiles passed overhead and air sirens wailed, I went to the market with friends. 

Those next few days became defined by a strange and impossible-to-navigate dichotomy: Above and around us were fighter jets, missile interceptions and the steady drumbeat of dire predictions. On the ground, I continued to experience the startling normalcy of everyday life in Amman, where taxi drivers eagerly rolled down their windows to point out the planes overhead as though they were simple spectacles rather than instruments of war. Almost every hour, this familiar rhythm was interrupted by frantic phone calls from friends, family and my university back home, all of whom could only see the horror of what was unfolding in the skies above me and across borders nearby. From where they stood, the danger appeared all-consuming. From where I stood, life continued in all its mundane ways. 

Four days after the strikes began, I woke to a plane ticket back to America sitting in my inbox, and that was the first morning I cried. I am not naive; I knew that Amman was no longer safe, as it was just days earlier, and understood that the situation could worsen before it ever improved. But what made me cry was not fear or relief but rather the realization that I was being asked to leave behind people who, in the span of only a month, had made this city feel truly like a second home. 

I cried for my host mother, sisters and little brother, and for the asymmetry of being able to leave a crisis my own country had created while they remained suspended within it. The guilt of that mobility, of being protected by the same passport implicated in the violence, is something I think I will carry for a very long time.

On my last night, we ordered Syrian ice cream, crossing one item off the long bucket list I had created for Jordan. I cannot tell you what the ice cream tasted like, but I remember with clarity the feeling that I sat with at the table: gratitude for my experience, but also grief for all the things that would now remain unfinished. The following week, my friends and I were meant to go to see Petra and Wadi Rum. It was my homestay sister’s birthday the weekend after, and my parents were arriving for a visit. These are small losses in the scale of things, but they are also the losses through which my grief felt legible. 

What I miss now is not simply the version of the semester I thought I would have, but the life in Amman that had provided me with a sense of home. I miss the cacophony of honks that filled the streets, each one carrying a different meaning. I miss meals at Hamada, where lunch was a falafel sandwich for less than a dollar, and the taxi drivers who treated me like a daughter and delighted in teaching me new Arabic words. I miss the Friday markets that, for some reason, always began on Thursday nights, my host mother’s hugs and yes, even that morning call to prayer. 

If there was a silver lining to this experience, it is not just that it gave me a better understanding of this conflict or an appreciation of life’s ability to persist, though all that is true. It is also in the language I began to grasp and, most importantly, for the gratitude it engendered within me for people who made such room for me in their lives. 

Maybe one day I will look back and get some larger lesson out of this whole experience, but for now, I am thankful for both the love that forced that ticket into my inbox and the love that I know will be waiting for me when I return to Jordan. I can’t imagine anything being more worthwhile.