A small sense of scale
One of the more peculiar memories of my childhood involves a globe that my parents suspended from the ceiling with wire, because its stand had broken. I recall spending hours tracing distances around it, the globe spinning like a record under the needle of my finger - Malaysia to Japan to San Francisco, lazily curving past New York, over France and Qatar, bumping past the Himalayas back down to KL.
Once you get a sense of scale, though, it ruins everything. You can't trace the distance from, say, Malaysia to Russia without the mind staggering at the thousands of miles dispensed of so effortlessly with one casual finger...and more to the point, you can't have something like this happen in Russia without feeling an ache of sheer, incomprehensible distance.
How it must have been, just this Friday gone past, when we were walking down the street in a rose-coloured daze, fingers entwined, conversing over a blissful drink or two - and just a finger's trace round the globe, a bullet was tearing the breath out of some wide-eyed child. How effortless it was for him to pick up the remote control and turn off the horror on CNN that night, while, a mere TV screen away, some imaginative Beslan hostage might have been praying for the same luxury.
I can't help thinking about how we watched Big Fish again this afternoon, and at the scene where the father is dying in a hospital bed, I looked up at him and said, "I never want to die in a hospital bed." "Shh, too soon," he murmured
but now, I can't help imagining those anguished Russian children, taking one small finger-step across the globe from Beslan, to appear in front of me, saying "Here, you can die like we did instead." Really, it was too soon for them, too. And then I'd hide under the blankets and pretend that the cool darkness and his arms are all that there is to the world
because, dammit, the truth is so, so much uglier.
Images from BBC.