The airports and the border were shut down for a month because the war had begun and the military had stopped all transportation. Only one port remained open. My mom had told us we would travel on a boat soon, so I was expecting it to be like the ones I had seen in the movies, with a pool and playrooms and all the other fun stuff.
When we arrived at the port, my mom pointed to a small cargo boat at the end of the pier. It was old and the paint was peeling. Workers were loading boxes of alcohol onto it. I could see there was no swimming pool. Once inside the boat I saw some families had brought blankets and pillows and I wondered why, but after a couple of hours I realized they had brought them because it was freezing. My family and I were laying on the top of those boxes on the side of the boat trying to sleep. We didn’t have any blankets and the ocean was rough. The spray from the waves hit us because the boat didn’t have a roof. I was terrified we would roll into the ocean.
As I looked at the sky the huge clouds covered the moon and I remembered one of the movies I had seen where a family was trying to escape aliens but they had all drowned. I realized I didn’t know where we were, not even the name of the country we were going to, on this last boat to leave Yemen before the military closed the port.
