PURE, FLAWLESS HAPPINESS

Reg Speller, Hulton Archive, Getty Images

  The bomb tears the air apart like ripping silk.
  And here I am, even as the sky shreds into fragments, a young woman lying flat on her face in her own kitchen, mouth, nose and ears filled with dust and plaster. Clinging on to the carpet as if she might fall off.
  I've been bombed. But this is the best moment of my life. The awfulness of it is already clear to me. People will be dying or horribly mutilated just a few broken bricks away from me. I'm not indifferent to their suffering - but even this knowledge can't stop me feeling immensely happy.
  Though my eyes are sticky with debris, the moment before the explosion has burned into my optic nerves like a film jammed on a frame. One moment I had been lying back on the grass in the warmth of the evening air, and the next I was running through the darkness towards the house - just as the air was beginning to fall apart.