I moved about my world
Friday evening I visited a fresh baby in a city centre hospital. I walked from my office to the hospital across the road and through a busy hallway to security for a pass to go up and meet a new human swaddled in a blanket. The dote was wearing fresh clothes and slept the whole hour. I’m told his eyes are the usual blue. Then I went home to eat a dinner made for me. It was an intricate enough recipe. After dinner, I sat in bed and drank a Campari spritz prepared from a bottle of the liqueur I grabbed in the airport a few weeks ago. A ‘fuck it’ purchase when I was coming home from a wedding in England. Sipping, I recalled a holiday to Italy last January. An hour after that, I found myself slouched in a posh cinema watching a classic horror movie. I napped for about forty minutes in the middle of the film. It was blissful. I used an app to get a taxi home and went to bed for about eight hours.
It was a lovely evening, a perfect start to the bank holiday. But after every full stop and before every capital letter I was looking at my phone. I read updates of the genocide Israel are carrying out against the Palestinian people. I saw videos of black skies flashing orange and white. I saw a woman holding a dead baby. I saw many bodies. I saw hospitals bombed. I watched clips of diplomats telling lies. I unfollowed Islamophobic celebrities on Instagram. I think, maybe dramatically maybe not, that this is the end of Europe but then I think that that Europe never really was, or it ended the day a boy’s brown body washed up on a beach and merchandise with the blue background and a closed circle of yellow stars kept being printed. I noted the countries which abstained or voted against bare minimum humanity at the United Nations. I felt ill.
Amid horror, I moved about my world with a greasy ease. My only tiny, fleeting moments of mild inconvenience related to the rain and the bus timetable. On Saturday morning, I shared videos of Jewish peace protestors in New York being arrested. In the afternoon, nursing a small headache, I watched news reports and social media posts of the march in Dublin. These days, I don’t switch anything off because I don’t have the right. Ceasefire now, free Palestine forever, shame on the west, shame on us.
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