Responses to posts in Friends’ page/s.
I SHARED my frustration with my housemate hours ago. My "confused torment." Coming from a country that is pummeled by typhoons (hurricanes in Asia) dozens of times a year, with years of rescue experience and exposure as a journalist, my pain is more mental/emotional but a different kind. Not really because I am devastated by Helene per se but because I couldn't relate. I feel people's agony but mine isn't what many feel; it is hell because my torment isn't connected. It cuts so deep because this pain has no ally right now.
I helped bury people in mass graves back home, saw kids die in evacuation centers, mostly unattended; an entire village buried in a pile of mud; cadavers floating. And so warring rebels and government troops declared a ceasefire themselves to help rescue and hand relief goods, rebuild shanties. Mostly those were dictatorship years. Yet when I read my FB page, people are arguing politics, people complain about a lying media, people accuse people of being karens and brats. Etcetera. Arguments that are peripheral or nonsense to me regardless of the election weeks ahead.
I wrote in one of my poems years ago that when I miss home, I miss the sorrow more than I miss the pleasures. In sorrow, that's when I saw people came out as one in tactical alliances; in pleasure, people mostly sever ties because pleasures come in so many versions. But sorrow as in hurricane ruins is one, singular swath of pain. And when 1 sorrow disrupts 30 pleasures, we get confused how to respond. So we point Left vs Right instead of simply helping a neighbor get up for a hot meal after the tempest. 🌬💨💓
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