I was going to write about Dr. Semmelweis and Mark Rylance and seeing him at the Harold Pinter Theatre with my friend, how we had dinner in J Sheekey and ate tuna tartare and fish pie and her friends joined us who were so clever and impressive I wondered after what I was doing with my life. I was going to say how the play was upsetting and brilliant and I had to leave at the interval to catch a train, how at Waterloo a young man with a spider web tattoo on his neck and a face that was skewed asked me for money for a hostel to sleep in that night and I refused, not having any coins and also being frightened by his sudden face, the twist of his body, how I felt bad after and went to look for him, found him, gave him a note and was immediately asked by his mate who I refused on the grounds that I’d already done it once and he said yeah but we don’t work together. How I walked away thinking he was somebody’s son. I was going to write about all these things until pain broke through a border and caused more pain on the other side, fired weapons, dropped bombs, set off missiles and interrupted two hundred and fifty ravers with a peppering of bullets. They found the bodies yesterday, a field of them, the ones who weren’t hurried onto motorbikes and taken, who’d imagined when they set off for that party that they’d be home by now, lying about their bedrooms remembering the pulse of music, not in some foreign place to them but in the afterglow of having danced all night, but no. That’s not what happened. The video shows the boom-boom repetitive beat of desert trance, the awnings psychedelic flapping in the sunshine of an early morning, two girls with that up-all-night relaxedness, their bodies moving of their own accord together, elbows bumping, their eyes closed and in the distance something coming. It shows two hundred, more, running across a field, the music stopped, the shouting begun, the boom-boom of gun fire, the bodies that were dancing now panicked and falling, the bodies that had danced all night now lying in a field. I dreamt of a house where they had all gone. It was painted white floorboards and clapperboard walls, it was light and airy and sunshine filled rooms of things they had done, clothes they made, projects they cared about, they walked the corridors busy with the next great thing, how to make the world a better place, a party they planned in the desert.
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It is just so sad, and barbaric! Words fail...especially at the lack of condemnation of the terrorists.
What your writing does. Takes us there. Inside the thoughts a person was having. Pulled away from a dream state, to a nightmare experience.