Tomorrow, people will talk about October 7 in the past tense.

God, it was three years ago.

And of course, that is how anniversaries work. We mark time because we need some way to hold it. We light candles, tell stories, return to photographs, say the names of the dead, count the years, and try to understand the distance between who we were then and who we are now.

But trauma does not move neatly with the calendar.

I have been thinking about that while reading an interview with Liri Albag, in Ynet, who was nineteen when she was kidnapped from held in Hamas captivity.

Just so you remember who she is, when Liri came home, she went back to the army. She had been kidnapped from her base at Nahal Oz, held for 477 days, and yet she chose to return to military service because she wanted to contribute, to stand with the soldiers who had fought to bring her home, and to reclaim a part of the life that had been stolen from her. When she learned that she was being released before Agam Berger, she reportedly tried to resist leaving without her; after she was home, she became one of the most insistent public voices demanding the return of those still in Gaza.

She is a lioness.

But she also shared something vulnerable. She described the first six months after coming home as almost euphoric. Only later, she says, did everything begin to sink in.

Her mother describes the family still moving carefully around her, never quite knowing what might trigger an outburst or an emotional flood.

In captivity, Liri says, the girls were not allowed to hug each other, cry together, or comfort one another. Eventually, she says, they stopped showing emotion almost entirely.

Now, back at home, she can barely watch television except cartoons, and sometimes she asks her mother or her sisters to sit beside her on the couch, give her their hand, stroke her, pamper her.

She jokes about it, because she is twenty-one years old and funny and alive and apparently still very much herself.

They took comfort away from her in captivity. Part of coming home has been learning how to receive comfort again.

There is something about that which feels important as we approach October 7.

For years, “bring them home” was one of the most urgent sentences in Jewish life.

But home is not a finish line.

You can cross the border and still carry the tunnel with you.

You can hug your mother and sleep in your own bed and fall in love and laugh and go to your sister’s wedding and still have a nervous system that remembers things you wish it would forget.

You can be happy and traumatized.

You can be rebuilding and still hurting.

You can want to devour life, as Liri’s mother describes her doing, and still need someone to sit beside you on the couch and hold your hand.

I think sometimes we want survival stories to be cleaner than they are.

We want the person to come home, and then we want the healing montage.

We want strength to look like fearlessness, recovery to look like normalcy, resilience to mean that the terrible thing no longer has power.

But that is not how human beings work.

Sometimes resilience looks like falling in love while still having triggers.

Sometimes it looks like rejoining the army because you need to close a circle, while your family is still learning which words feel dangerous.

Sometimes it looks like laughing about wanting to be spoiled because you spent 477 days being denied the most basic forms of tenderness.

For many of us, October 7 is still happening.

It is happening in bodies that still react before the mind knows why.

In parents who know exactly what a knock at the door can mean.

In children who learned far too young what a siren means.

In soldiers who came home changed.

In survivors who returned to families who love them desperately and are still learning how to love the person who came back.

In people who are building beautiful lives that do not erase what happened to them.

We should absolutely mark the anniversary.

But part of remembering October 7 is also understanding that for the people who lived through it most directly, memory is not something they visit once a year.

It lives with them.

And perhaps one of the most tender things we can do is stop demanding that survival look like being finished with what happened.

Incredible photo of Liri and her mom by Adi Orni.