By Jan Fran (posted on Instagram).
For almost three months there has been a feeling in the pit of my stomach. It’s there when I sleep, it’s there when I wake up. It’s there when I go to work, it’s there when I’m waiting in line at the supermarket checkout. It’s there when I smile, it’s there when I don’t. It’s there all the time.
It’s as though my guts are inside a food processor that began slowly churning one day and still hasn’t stopped. Some days it churns harder and faster than others. Some days it’s subdued but if I stop what I am doing I can feel it.
I’m not quite sure what the feeling is exactly.
Maybe it’s shock at the scale of the horror, the indiscriminate killing.
Maybe it’s disgust at the impotency and hypocrisy of our leaders.
Maybe it’s revulsion at the cheerleaders and apologists or bewilderment at how their brains have been configured in ways so different to mine.
Maybe it’s rage at the contrarians whose mouths twist in formations I can understand but can not condone.
Maybe it’s whiplash at seeing corpses pulled from rubble right before an advertisement for discounted swimsuits.
Maybe it’s disappointment at those who have not spoken up and even more disappointment at those who have punished those who have.
Maybe it’s fear that I too will be punished in some way, at some point.
Maybe it’s trepidation as the scaffolding of my profession buckles under the weight of immense criticism.
These feelings are all in there somewhere I’m sure, but the overwhelming feeling is heartbreak. Sheer, unadulterated heartbreak. For the children. The dead, maimed, mutilated, orphaned, traumatised starving children.
It’s heartbreak for the children who are no longer children. The children left to care for other children. The lost children who have lost everything. The hungry children who show up with empty buckets only to be told there is no food left to fill them. The children who will have to rebuild their bodies, their minds and their hearts. The children we’ve decided are not worth saving. The innocent children. The children who did nothing to deserve the unfathomable horror that has befallen them.
Children just like our children. Like my boy. My sweet, sweet boy who still thinks the world is good because it has been nothing but. How do I tell him?
I can not look at my boy without seeing his face collapse. I can’t stop seeing his flesh melt into his bones or his limbs dislodge from his torso. I can’t stop seeing his tiny body crushed beneath hundreds of tonnes of concrete. I can not stop hearing him wail for a father who will never come. It is a horror show that plays on loop in my mind, one that feels like a figment of a diseased imagination until I realise, every day, that it is real life.
It is something I saw, not something I conjured.
I have tried to choose my words carefully, to be delicate and considered but all I want to do is scream. Scream, scream, scream at the top of my lungs, STOP. Please, please, please stop. Fucking, fucking stop. Stop, stop, stop. This must stop.
I harboured a small flame, since snuffed, that if we all screamed loud enough something might change but the compounding heartbreak has been the realisation that ours seems a world that will watch a genocide unfold and do nothing to stop it or worse yet let it unfold and tell you it didn’t. You did not see what you just saw.
The processor can not process this and so my stomach churns. On and on and on.
A new year is upon us.
The only resolution I care about is one that heralds an immediate and permanent ceasefire.
