Mortality

At around 6am today, I was woken up by an alert I received on my handphone. It had the heading “Emergency Alert” and the rest was in Japanese language. The feeling of disorientation quickly gave way to a sense of urgency and I checked my Twitter feed for the latest news. I thought it might have been an earthquake warning. Turns out that North Korea had launched a ballistic missile towards the northern part of Japan.

A sickening feeling stirred in my stomach. There weren’t too many definite or concrete news article on Twitter. Some said the missile flew over Japan, some said there was another missile headed towards Japan. I finally found some tweets which translated the emergency alert. The alert apparently informed the Japanese people about the missile and asked them to seek shelter or go underground. In my mind, I thought of all the possible places to seek shelter. I remembered during the earthquake drill we did a year ago the go-to location was the gym. 

I lifted the blinds of my window and saw the blue sky. It seemed devoid of missile and when I looked down I didn’t see anyone moving towards the gym. My guess is that no one was awake yet. I checked the university email in case there was any instruction regarding the alert but no email. I wondered if I should wake my friends up and head towards the gym but I wasn’t sure how grave the situation really was. All I could do at that point was to keep refreshing my Twitter feed.

A few minutes later I received a second emergency alert and my panic heightened. I started to pray and thought about what I should do next. Whether unconsciously or not, my mind recalled the scene in the final episode of the sixth season of Game of Thrones; the scene where Margaery Tyrell looked at the High Sparrow right before wildfyre engulfed everyone in the Sept of Baelor. I am not making light of the situation by comparing it to a television show about a fictional world. It just came to me and together with what happened this morning, it made me realise how horrifying it would be to find yourself in a situation that was about to happen in a few seconds and there is nothing you can do about it. 

An hour later, I finally found articles which said the missile flew over Hokkaido, broke into three pieces and fell into the sea. 

It was a huge relief but I still feel uneasy.