At the beginning of the year this year, as the clock tipped into a new decade, I thought about the 300,000 or so refugees that were still languishing in camps in Sri Lanka. What did they do wrong? Why were their lives like that and my life so different? Would things ever change for them? Or would they always live in an unchanging matrix of repression, poverty and pain? Even amidst that squalor, was it still possible to find joy in life? Through children, parents, lovers and friends? And what of the thousand other injuries and indignities that become normalized in those camps?
I think that until one loses someone, to death, like that; a parent, a sibling, a child, a lover, a friend; one would never really know what loss is. And to confront that kind of permanent loss; especially if taken before their time; taken against their will, - is incomprehensible. The human mind is so limited in its scope, so fragile in its build; that to accept this kind of loss; to accommodate it, is to experience a fundamentally changed vision of the world; it will never be the same again.
So, instead of the almost trivial daily mundanities that fill up our lives; I wish that we, that I, could concentrate on what truly matters; and shed the faded skin of what actually makes up daily life.
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