I can't write more than this
Someone, anyone needs to tell me that this is fake, and that it's not a video of that incident in Korea. Please.
[Edit] The last thing I want to do now is to compose a piece of writing on the experience, so this is the email I wrote in the wake of those moments, because I needed to reach out to someone who would understand. It's raw and unpolished, and that's how it's going to stay.
...now I've had some time to compose myself. Sorry for the incoherence earlier.
see, it started when I stumbled upon this video - and a website full of similar clips. It took me several watchings of two or three videos to start crying uncontrollably. Delayed response, I suppose. And I suppose also that I should have stopped watching, but you know how it is with picking scabs...
It's a different kind of crying to grief or sorrow or anything...it's that kind of choked-off scream that lodges in your throat and turns into gasps, and the tears are largely incidental. I keep asking, "how can people do this to each other"-type questions, which the videos fail MISERABLY to answer, causing me to conclude that
the world is fucking insane
no, really. Between the horrific images and the sound of end-of-term laughter outside my door and the beautiful peach-juice sky outside, it was just too much surreality, I suppose. A macabre parallel, like a brutal reminder, of the way that these unimaginable deeds are happening simultaneously as I live out my blissful little sheltered life here at uni. Peach skies and all. And I just needed to be touched somehow, I just wanted to be picked up like a child and be told that everything would be all right, not out of an inability to grasp the horror, but as though the greater my capacity to grasp, the greater the urgency with which I sought denial. I feel...I feel older, not in the sense of maturity, but...*aged*. Tired, and heavy.
two thoughts occur, one, that budding historians like myself will study the killing of the Korean translator, or the American journalist, or whatever, in the future, from textbooks perhaps, and never really know the enormity of the horror. Just like, perhaps, I study the Cold War and Russian Revolutions with that perennial historical dispassion, necessarily macroscopic in its attention to detail...but I'll never *really* know how it was, will I? And two, that I just sobbed and cried for half an hour, alone on my bed, and: nothing has changed in the world. What was the point of feeling in the first place?
I don't want to dwell, but every time those images flash in my head, all I can feel is this rising nausea and an urge to fall down and sink into the ground and not do anything or say anything ever again, because it seems futile to feel or do anything when nothing I feel or do will ever make a difference
ironic really, that it was only just now you said that I'm strong.