There are some things that I can't write about, not really; yet I can't stay quiet about them either. Blogs are not the places to discuss bottomless despair and unbounded grief, but somehow to ignore them seems wrong, too. At least 190 human beings lost their lives yesterday in Spain, people who were traveling to work, to do the shopping, to school. People with spouses and friends, children and jobs; people who were thinking what to make for supper that night, who were checking the soccer scores, who were taking one more quick nap before the day's activities really started. People who loved and feared, hated and adored, felt bored and laughed at silly jokes. People who are now dead, ultimately to be remembered mostly as numbers in the political struggles for power by others.
For those who loved them today is the first day of the After: a horrible time, a time that nobody wants to live through, a time that doesn't seem possible to live through, yet something that must be lived through. There is no other way out but through the necessary suffering. My heart breaks for them, or would break for them if it would do any good at all. But only time, the horrible time, will do any good, and even that will be limited. The lives of the survivors will continue, yes, and slowly they will be patched together again, but they will never be the same: the scars will fade, but they will not stop aching, one will get used to the sudden gaping holes in ones heart, but the holes will not close.
This is what death does. And there are no words vile enough to describe those who use it like a chainsaw in their fanatically orchestrated plans for supremacy.
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Postscript: If this sounds familiar, it is. As familiar as the violence that caused it.