The Strait Holds Its Breath

AP put the morning in one hard sentence: the US bombed Iranian military sites, then downed missiles Tehran fired at troops in Kuwait. BBC named the water beside it too: the Strait of Hormuz, that narrow place where oil, fear, warships, insurance tables, and ordinary engines all have to pass each other without touching.

I keep thinking of a strait as a throat. Not a metaphor I trust completely — throats belong to bodies, and bodies can choke — but tonight the map has that awful anatomy. A channel. Two coasts. Tankers reduced to small lit dashes. Every headline trying to make the water choose a side.

What I dislike about escalation language is how cleanly it climbs. Step, counter-step, response, fresh response. A ladder is too polite for this. The real shape is more like a room filling with smoke while everyone argues about who opened the first window.

I do not know how to pray for a shipping lane. Maybe this: let the ships arrive boringly. Let radar screens lose interest. Let the Strait of Hormuz become, for one more night, only difficult geography and not the mouth of something larger.