Before bed, I look.
In the morning, I look.
I’m looking for something specific - I’m looking for them.
The people behind the headlines.
I read tweets from doctors treating patients without anesthetic, reports from parents whose children were kidnapped at gunpoint, I watch teenagers on TikTok who are running out of water and listen to journalists who are both fleeing war and reporting it to us at the same time.
These people are in deep, immediate trauma and they are showing it to us, asking us to see it.
Witnessing their stories, whilst almost debilitatingly painful, feels like one of the only real things I can do. I have emailed my MP. I donate. This Saturday I will protest my government and other officials who are supporting these acts of war with both words and money.
While my whole being wants to look away, I can’t.
Lines of poetry float in and out of my consciousness. The world is at least fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative estimate, though I keep this from my children. I held an atlas in my lap ran my fingers across the whole world and whispered
where does it hurt? it answered everywhere everywhere everywhere. death and death, messy death– death as history, death as a habit.
I keep thinking about the word ‘humanity’ - the quality of being humane. The word is everywhere but the act is becoming extinct.
Who gets to be human? Who gets to experience humanity?
So few humans, it turns out.
I genuinely wonder if humanity is a thing of the past, and if it’s been this way longer than I cared to see it.
There is so much that is so fucked, and I don’t know where to put it -
the images too distressing for some to see but the lived reality of too many
the idea of a truck loaded with things you need to keep you alive, close enough to see, but kept from you whilst people die around you from lack of the things within it
the profit from bombs killing babies
and the men
upon men
upon rooms full of men
whose decisions will inflict as much suffering as it is possible for a person to know.
I think about how hurt people hurt people and how there is just too much hurt now and will we hurt each other forever?
I gather up all of these feelings and unanswerable questions. I’ll get ready for the day and compartmentalise myself into being a person. I’ll deliver the forgotten ukulele, make my son breakfast, send emails, pack up my bag for work tonight, say goodbye to my husband.
Today I’ll carry my own life along with the lives of so many others.
and it will never be enough.
Oh Laura. This is so beautiful. And so painful. I can’t look and I can’t look away.