Massacre

after massacre and I know it is so easy to get all haughty on a subject like this, so I will try to avoid it (probably unsuccessfully). Instead I will try to share a single flash that skipped neurons somewhere deep inside my brain while watching the show.

So first a little about the setting, just so you know in what sort of circumstances this flash occurred: the show speaks about the various massacres that took place through history and when they reached the 800.000 people that were estimated to be slaughtered during the 100 day Rwandan genocide (I think I got this right, but with all the massacres I saw that evening, quite a few of which took place in my lifetime, I might have been dazed and confused, and mixed some data) the flash appeared.

 In my flash I was trying to imagine all these people, give them names and faces, because, c’mon, let’s be real, life is never a mere statistic. So, the following people flashed in front of my eyes:

All the people in the maternity ward in Perivale, none of whom I remember (but I imagine was full of nurses, doctors, babies, mothers, fathers), my parents, my grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, Shirley and all the kids at her place, the dustman who I used to talk to on my way to Shirley’s, all the people in the elementary school in London, all the people in nursery school in Ljubljana, the people in elementary school in Ljubljana, at Holland park comprehensive, secondary school in Ljubljana, at University, on the streets of Ljubljana or London, in the streets of Paris, Lisbon, Budapest or Sagres or any other place I have visited, the nurses and doctors in my too common visits to the hospital, the girlfriends I had, the people I met at various work related meetings, all the friends I have made, all the people I met in the theatre, at concerts, in galleries, the people I shared a drink or two with in various bars and the cute waitresses who brought me those drinks, the people who wanted to kick my ass when I was younger (luckily this does not seem to happen anymore (touch wood)), the beggars I say hello to as I pass them… I imagined all of them, in a single flash, you know how weird these things are in the brain, the few thousand people I interacted with in my life, and it flashed, ok, so you have all gone. Just like that. Everybody I know and anybody I have ever known (even people I know only virtually), everybody I am still going to get to know, everybody who rubbed off a minute speck of themselves onto me, all gone.  In a single massacre. At this stage my brain shut down and returned to the show, because it found a bit hard to deal with this. On the personal side of the massacre.

So, I will leave it at this.