Keep your eyes open

This morning my heart is heavy. Not in a way I've experienced before, but in a leaden way that makes it feel like there's no room for it in my chest. Like my ribs are just toothpicks that splinter with each breath. I feel fragile today.

I am waiting for news. News that will affect me in a profound way, but more importantly, news that will affect so many others. I'm not unwell and my family is fine too. But there is news to come nonetheless and I am on call like a junior doctor, and like her my confidence in myself has been shaken.

Last night I made a decision I'd been putting off for months. If you can't see it it's not real, right? I usually despise that attitude, but I allowed myself this double standard as I thought my ignorance was protecting me. Ignorance protects no one. It is a fragile membrane covering me that makes things on the outside foggy, but it is easily torn. I looked at images and heard testimony that both sickened and frightened me, and I'm used to seeing horrific images.

As a Jewish child we are shown scenes from the Holocaust by the time we can speak, before we know what it is that we're seeing. Bodies heaped upon other bodies, mass graves and gas trucks covered with the marks of humans desperate to get out inside. 'They tore each other to pieces' I was told. 'None of them had faces when the doors were open and I was in charge of pulling out the gold teeth from these faceless, brutalized heaps of flesh that were no longer human.' As a child I heard that 'mothers wrung the necks of their babies and children on the train platforms so they didn't have to get on board.' Of course that didn't make sense to me then, but hearing the same story told from a monitor hanging on the wall at 26-years-old I understood. It was an act of mercy to save the smallest from the worst fate imaginable.

What I watched last night was different, but it was still bodies. Bodies blown into bits, bodies who actually looked like pieces of meat that had been shot with a cannon. Bodies of children whose limbs had been scattered. Bodies of men who were fighting and surrendered but were then shot in the face. I couldn't look any more. I covered my eyes and continued to listen, but I couldn't see those images anymore and today I feel like a coward. I feel the dead deserve to be looked at. That to understand what really happened you need to keep your eyes open. But how can you do that and not feel like this today? How can people carry out these actions, these attacks on other humans and not feel like this today? Feel so much worse today? How are they able to walk and eat breakfast and love their children?

I will never know this and I will never understand this. And if I do I will worry for myself, but these things are happening and they are all around us. Every day I am thankful for what I have and for the fact that I feel safe when I walk alone. I stupidly don't feel fear. I have been conditioned to feel safe and that is dangerous. Like a cow who has been domesticated and is unaware it is being led to slaughter, I meander through countries and feel like what is happening to the people who live there is not happening to me. In Thailand when citizens are burning effigies and pouring their own blood on the steps of government buildings I arrive in my maxi dress and drink lemongrass cocktails. In Sri Lanka I sit amongst people who have had everything possible torn from them and I sing them Jessie J. In the Maldives while riots rage on the island of Male I catch a speedboat to another Island and stare out into the ocean thinking about how beautiful it all is. In Vietnam I burrow through the Cu Chie Tunnels and complain about how dirty I am afterwards.

I don't ever feel the danger and that is just fucking stupid of me. I will keep my eyes open and I promise that I will now be open to feeling the danger. That does not mean I will be afraid, but I will be smarter and I will be more respectful of the journey that is happening in all future countries I visit. I will be mindful of the fact that all of those people just want to feel like me, they just want to feel safe when walking alone.