we gather in the heart of the city to mourn the loss of innocent life and the conscience of humanity. there are candles and heavy spirits carrying the weight of twelve months of harboured anger at a world that refuses to listen to the screams of the children. we hold a minute of silence for the martyrs. I feel the tears itch down my neck and into my collar and cannot fathom the resilience of those who have always known, who never had a choice to wake up to the truth but have carried the pain of their people’s persecution for decades. a ten year old Palestinian takes to the microphone to report on the massacre of fifteen thousand children, asking why nobody on the news seems to care. behind me, between the mourners and the police, a reporter adjusts her hair in the reflection of the camera. I wonder what she’s going to say about us and what she really thinks.
the crowd is still as stone and the vigil is like a funeral. there are poems and speeches and almost everyone cries. but there is no body over which we mourn. there is mention of parents unable to recover any identifying feature of their children from the rubble of their schools to bury. I cry in shame at the horrors I dismissed as ‘too complicated’ just one year ago. we are reminded that there is no such thing, that there is no symmetry between resistance and colonial genocide, that for the systems that govern our every day some suffering is just too inconvenient to acknowledge.
on the platform I open my phone to a sea of pleas for validation. the apathy is deafening. I see myself in this epidemic of self obsession and I am sick. I scroll and mourn the faith I once held in a world that cares. in the shower I wash my face and want to wake up.
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