I’m in the back of an orange Skoda Fabia, with the white and green license plate that marks us as Palestinians, cruising through the mountains of the West Bank on our way to the crag. I grabbed a Black Diamond bottle opener, which I acquired from the Black Diamond store in Boulder, Colorado, earlier this year, to crack open the best, cheapest soda water one can find these days. It’s called Uludag, and it’s imported all the way from Turkey. The Uludag tasted like everything else, 20% despair and 80% anxiety.

We decided to go climbing that day, not with the hopes of sending a new route but simply to escape the heaviness of life for a bit, to pretend we live in a place that loves peace, recycles its trash, and is free to worry about climate change and other threats that are far in the future.

October 7th was the day before. Today our busy, noisy, traffic-filled streets were alarmingly quiet and empty. A few pedestrians walked in silence, with thousand-yard stares on their faces. On the way to go climbing, my friends and I swung by a supermarket, which was technically closed in protest of the bombs that had already begun falling on Gaza. A supermarket employee, however, kindly smuggled us in through a slivered door. Our mission was to find three things: crackers, Hershey’s chocolate, and marshmallows, the secret recipe to happiness and the remedy to every heartache, famously known as s’mores, perhaps America’s best export to the world.

My climbing harness and shoes felt tighter that day, and climbing felt heavier. As I was about to clip the last bolt before the anchor, an ambulance siren pierced the air and forced us to pause. Red lights flickered in the visible distance. I couldn’t even finish one route before being snapped back to reality.

I’ve been climbing every Friday, just like before. Fridays are our community’s day off, and for us Palestinian climbers, it’s our crag day. Lately, I can be off from work whenever I want, as there’s not much to be done in my family’s clothing factory during times of war.

Climbing feels heavy. So does walking, cycling, running, crying, laughing, eating, working, cooking, and breathing. The only thing that has been light is my sleep. Every night I am awakened by nightmares. I see death everywhere. It’s on the news, it’s on social media, it’s all anyone is talking about. Death is in my head, in my hands, in my dreams.

I’m haunted by an experience I had two years ago when a settler named Elisha stood on top of a cliff we were climbing at, pointed his gun at me and demanded to know who I was. I stammered in Hebrew to tell him that we were hiking (not climbing, of course), feeling like a helpless child getting bullied at school. I felt like my only protection was my DSLR camera mounted on my tripod. If he shot me, would he be able to get the memory card before one of my friends could take it and run for his life, too? Would it have even mattered in the end?

That feeling of being bullied, cornered, and helpless with a gun pointed at you is how life in Palestine feels right now. I am fearful of the constant midnight military raids, the 6 a.m. snipers who take down young men and boys in flip-flops and pajamas out to buy the daily bread. That could be my father or uncle going to work. Or me. That’s the point of it all. It’s not just senseless killing. It’s to remind you to be afraid because you’ve committed the crime of being born in the land of Jesus, speak the wrong language, follow the wrong religion, and have skin that’s one shade too dark.

I feel full of doubt and fear while climbing now more than usual. I find myself climbing and second guessing everything. Did I clip the quickdraw right? Am I cleaning this anchor correctly? Is this a clove hitch?

It’s another Friday. My belayer lowers me to the ground as I hope my knot doesn’t come undone or that the rope just unravels like everything else in this world. I wonder if my friends feel the same while climbing. I never dared to ask. I take my shoes off and reach for my phone and see the baptist hospital was bombed. A man is carrying his children’s parts in a plastic white supermarket bag. I think about life in Boulder for a moment, where people would be upset to see you carrying a plastic grocery bag. I hate this bag for what it had to carry, not for the fish it hurt in the sea.

I get home at 10 p.m. My mother angrily greets me and says, “Where were you all day?” I, in my dirty climbing clothes and chalk-dusted hands, am afraid she’ll know I went climbing outdoors, where any angry soldier or settler can shoot me.

“At a cafe with my friends,” I said.

She said, “Well, Asia, who goes to a cafe when people are dying?!”

As much as I am filled with gratitude that my family is safe, I am also filled with the fear that this “safety” is just an illusion. That it could disappear in a moment. I look at my mother, father, siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and friends and I am thankful that I get to see them everyday. I think about the tens or hundreds of thousands of people who no longer get to see their loved ones as they are now buried and hidden under rubble. I try to imagine what it would be like to lose all family members at once. How could you ever continue living afterwards? And what would be worse: dying or the misery of being left behind? How can someone breathe after they had just seen the crisp burnt body of their child?

By November 4th, everything had blended together for me. All days look and feel the same, and if you ask me what day it is I wouldn’t know. My scrambled eggs and espresso coffee taste of anxiety. Whether I’m awake or asleep, it all seeems like a bad dream.

I go on a 2 km run, then meet my friends at a cafe in Ramallah for peppermint tea.

“Did you see the eco-friendly German tanks they are using?” my friend Sami said, jokingly.

“Ah, a sustainable way to kill people!” another said.

We all laughed. Palestinians are famous for dark humor. You have to be when your existence is the punchline.

Al Jazeera has been on every TV: at my grandparents’ home, at the store, on a loudspeaker at work, at the pizza shop, at the climbing gym. My friend Ahmad observed, “We watch the news so closely, as if the news is not talking about us … but we are the news!”

I was with my 84-year-old grandma, applauding her for turning off the TV for a bit. Just then the phone rang, and my aunt in Qatar was frantically crying and saying, “The news, have you seen the news?!”

Wael Al Dahdouh’s family was massacred—his wife, daughter, son, and grandson. A famous Al Jazeera journalist, Wael Al Dahdouh has been on TV in our homes since 2004. I cried hours later when I caught a glimpse of him covering the news at the hospital. How can a man breathe after that?

The news and this reality cannot be escaped right now, not by shutting off the TV or turning off your phone or even by going climbing.

Throughout the years climbing has been the best tool to escape my tough reality under the occupation and, trust me, I’ve tried other things. I’m known for never skipping a climbing day. I climb religiously every Friday with the rest of the community. Even during war. I haven’t skipped a single Friday.

Before climbing I suffered from depression and anxiety. Life is tasteless and aimless when you’re depressed. I always blamed my parents for knowing our reality yet they brought me into this life anyway. I always blamed them for my childhood consisting of watching the apartheid wall being built, and going through checkpoints daily.

Climbing changed my view on life because nothing in this universe has topped the feeling of my first ever climb, or the adrenaline rush I had finishing my project (5.10a) recently. Climbing is my life now. I have happily spent most of my money on climbing gear. Climbing has turned my life upside down in a good way, and I am forever thankful to Tim Bruns (aka Tamtoom) for bringing climbing to Palestine.

The first few weeks of war, everyone kept silent while climbing. But one day we decided after a long climbing day to stay and sit around the fire. We talked about silly things and discussed our projects. We laughed, we danced, we had oranges, we took turns smoking shisha (hookah), we smoked cigarettes … We forgot about the war. For a few seconds, we felt free under the stars, and for the first time in a long while I went home with a smile on my face.

Right now, I feel filled with hate toward anyone who offers a sense of hope for the future here. How dare they feel something that I cannot imagine?

I hate how much I love the olive trees and mountains in Palestine. I hate how much I love my family. I hate the beautiful sunsets that fill my heart with warmth and joy, after a day of climbing. I hate how much I love our crags. I hate cycling next to an endless apartheid wall, getting a chocolate croissant in the morning from Khamireh bakery and an iced americano with a dash of milk. I hate the crisp fresh Ramallah air at my 8 pm run, the generous and warm people, the shawarma, the falafel, the morning sun. I hate them all because they tie me to Palestine, this cursed and beautiful hell. I hate that this is my home because I know I love it too much to ever leave.

All photos by Asia Zughaiar. Follow her on Instagram.