The Heart · Kaitlin Prest

PROLOGUE | The Best Valentine's Day I Ever Had

July 19, 2024·34 min·3 clips

Caitlin Prest's belated birthday message to her friend Mehika becomes the first moment she knows something has happened in Palestine.

The story starts in messages. Caitlin says it begins in late October, when a birthday note to Mehika runs into group texts about buying e-sim cards for a journalist friend. Something has changed. News from Palestine is no longer background noise. Al Jazeera reports, damaged homes in Gaza, displacement, and missing children keep breaking through the part of her that would rather look away. She cries, and the episode lets that stay small and human without losing sight of what is happening outside the phone. Friends are not in the mood for anything. Headlines keep getting worse. October 20th and October 27th land as markers in a run of fear, damage, healthcare facilities hit, and people begging for it to stop. Then January arrives. South Africa brings a genocide case against Israel to the International Court of Justice. Israel and the United States deny the accusation. Caitlin turns toward Canada with a plain, uneasy question: why did her own country not make the same kind of public, formal move? Doing something sounds simple until she tries to do it. Calling a representative is not simple for her, and neither are emails or other official little tasks that somehow become a wall. So she starts at the awkward beginning. Google. Forms. A fan message to Serge Tankian that is half plea, half very aware long shot. CJPME gives her a tool to phone an MP and ask for a ceasefire. The mailbox is full. The script is already old. It says more than 8,000 Palestinians have been killed; she notes the number is now around 22,000. Nothing lands cleanly. After reading through orders about land, settlements, return, activity, and compensation, she remembers the ICJ has no execution arm and that the United States has a Security Council veto. So she comes back to noise. If her own attempt was messy, embarrassing, and maybe useless, the listener does not have much to lose by trying too. She signs off softly. Maybe tomorrow she tries again. Maybe the listener tries with her.

As heard by us

Caitlin Prest turns political paralysis into a jagged, intimate audio essay about Gaza, grief, and the awkward work of speaking up.

In "PROLOGUE | The Best Valentine's Day I Ever Had," Caitlin Prest turns a late-October birthday message into a record of conscience under pressure.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

The host calls her MP about Gaza, gets a full mailbox, then asks you to try with her.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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