As time goes on, we become numb. We become desensitized to the suffering that envelops and caresses the people of our external world. We watch the news. We read the articles and Whatsapp stories forwarded to us from nameless aunties and faceless families. We post on Instagram to spread awareness, to educate those that we are connected to across a vast expanse of mechanically generated space. We take the time to spread knowledge amongst the people that we’ve hand-picked for ourselves, people who we’ve chosen because of how their beliefs align with ours. We crave to identify, to show and share – look what is happening, what is being done to my people, to my roots, to my identity. A constant cycle of regurgitated information into and out of hands pre-acquainted. Through time, I’ve noticed that my personal brand of desensitization comes in oscillations – in tsunami-like waves that cascade through my body. Suffering has a way of knowing with definite precision, the months in which I consume and share and feel absolutely nothing at all. In those moments, she whispers in my ear and sends me reminders in those bodies where my love grows like a forest. And I begin to drown as I watch them grieve.
There are two griefs that I have been acquainted with in my tenure on this patch of sadistic and stolen land. The first is what I think of as direct grief – the mourning of a personal loss. The physical or emotional loss of a person, of an era, of a version of the self, all things that are grieved with a pervasive quality. It is a grief active in the way it is remembered, but the loss may dull as time breeds a new normalcy and erases the specificity of surrounding memories. I often used to wonder why I was immune to life’s direct griefs. I would listen to my parents speak with humble tongues of memories now faded by past eras, eras treacherous in the way they littered their worlds with tragedy. And I’d think, how was it that I had sauntered through life unscathed by circumstance? How much grief awaits me, biding time in the cracks and crevices of open and closed doors, multiplying to make up for lost time?
Almost as if to substitute the volumes of direct grief hidden in the folds of my future selves, the second of the two griefs is the residue that never fades – a grief that comes from watching loved ones mourn a direct loss. Residual because it is the remnants of that which is already being grieved. A loss that is removed and detached and that is only suffered through watching a loved one agonize over what they cannot control. And an inherent guilt in watching with an obsessive compulsion, but in not being able to alleviate the pain. I have never suffocated from anything the way I have from residual grief. But there is no guidance, no manual to deal with suffocation abstract. So when my lungs close, I am reminded that my pain is nothing but the remainder of a pain gargantuan and unbearable, a pain that shakes the ground and cracks the earth where it treads. A pain that was never meant for my body, but that my body takes on in a desperate attempt to provide some semblance of comfort. I think of what it means to be so deeply crippled by second hand pain, knowing well that the river flowing through subjects of tragedy would swallow me whole.
I am overwhelmed by a hatred for the privileges that serve me comfort with a callous ease, comforts from a genetic lottery with tickets embedded within the intricacies of my body. Embedded so deep that I cannot forcefully shred myself, rip them out and sew them into another more deserving. I am ridiculed by the grief that I was numb to when it plagued lives seen solely through my various screens. Lessons learnt have turned me into a broken record, a helpless bystander of anguish suspended in a vacuum of self-hatred. Please tell me what I can do.
Images - تصاویر 