clinging to the wreckage

  After the death of one’s mother, the world seems cloaked in death. A blood red cloak of unrelenting night. We want to be seen and loved, but all slips away into the darkness, and all we can do is cling to those who remain, hoping for as much time as possible. Before her death, people came into my life needing light, but I was too deeply buried in my own shelter, afraid of having my individuality taken away. That caused hurt to others. After her death, although I had family and friends around the world to talk to, there was only one person who was physically here. She too had lost her mother as well as her father and her husband. Nine months after my mother’s death, this friend died, too, while I was travelling around Europe, drunk with friends. This often haunts me. She deserved more.   As a youngster, secure in my family home, I was able to watch and read anything. I loved horror, in fact, and read a lot of difficult novels about hardship that made me grateful for my parent...

  Awake again… 03:48. Thoughts ripple through the silence and then a solitary voice calls out in the distance. What are the others doing at this time? Are they sleepless, too, or are they arriving home from a party? Are they waking up to travel somewhere or to take care of a restless child? Of course, the clocks changed, we went one hour back, ‘an extra hour in bed’. That doesn’t really apply when one has been awake since a few minutes after 2am.                         I think of the scientist… how I gave so much love, and more, until she left to find more… to find younger, stronger, faster, richer. I think of decades earlier, the sportswoman, how I left because I was merely there to fill a gap but ridiculed by her rich circle of friends because I was not that… they were ‘adults’ buying homes, getting married, having children… I was in a punk rock band, spending my days with skateboarders and artists. I thi...

  A sunset walk, a book, the lake, the silver light shimmering on the water as the sinks under a blanket of night and leaves us until tomorrow. People are calm and smiling, saying hello, and I feel grateful because the book that I am reading is disturbing. It is Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng, and it is essential for us to know because so many were or are unaware of the suffering that minorities feel at the hands of a ‘patriotic’ mass at times. The book takes place in an imaginary post-crisis dystopia, but it is remarkably similar to the events that occurred during covid, whereby a government trying to ramp up anti-immigrant war fever kept repeating ‘China’ and blaming them for everything from the virus to the economic downturn of the US economy. It resulted in a wave of anger, hatred, and attacks against the Asian community. Hateful leadership leading hateful people to do hateful things.   Finally, I go to bed and fall into a sleep of dreams. In one of those dreams, I was ...

  Part I   My fear, as the week hurtles towards an end, is that we may see some really desperate attempt to create a dramatic global event from the leader losing health, losing power, losing credibility, losing legally, losing romantically. So, we drift in some form of hope, some form of fear, of doubt, of concern. Some people think they will receive money if they vote a certain way. Some people are simply terrified of betraying the father figure. The rising number of people who simply want common decency, the rising number of educated people in critical areas, give me hope. But that hope is a sceptical hope when I know that it goes up against the money of insane billionaires and the corruption of lost leaders with nothing to lose.     Part II                   As a European, I always heard stories like ‘Americans know nothing outside of America.’ As a European who is now also an Ame...

  Another horrific train crash near Madrid, the high-speed trains I have taken so many times, and I think of the horror of the loss for those families impacted. I think of the extremely excited children I’d see onboard, fascinated by the train and the adventure. It’s almost too much to bear.                      We go through our days troubled by tiny matters like a conversation that went badly at work, a sports teams losing, a friend getting upset, someone making a decision to distance themselves from us… then there is the cold harsh reality of 64 people losing their lives instantly in a crash of this magnitude, not to mentioned those who will be injured, disfigured, disabled forever.                     During my years living in Madrid I was always amazed by how loving and peaceful the people were. So, tonight, saddened, I drif...

  It is a shame that they do not read, they do not research. They don’t understand that being taught or told lies about the past, about the bad things that a country has done, doesn’t make one unpatriotic, it makes us more aware of our mistakes and, hopefully, able to avoid them. The British Empire’s activities are not taught as glorious, and books written by global writers capture tales from different colonies. If those books were all removed, along with history books and teachings, and suddenly we were told only that Great Britain’s history was magnificent, it would be a tragedy. Likewise, Germany’s history and, in particular, the events around World War II. Sadly, we see it in real time where people are upset at the suggestion that going to war is not a show of strength and power, and that it is a catastrophic event resulting in the loss of lives, dignity, respect, and long-term hopes of peace. Doing horrific things at the border to innocent people merely searching for hope for ...