I can’t write about little girls swept away in flash floods   brown roiling river glutted on the bird boned babies of Christian families left with empty hands   fingers spread so all the coins fall through    I suppose people want to know their stories because there are fewer of them    Twenty-seven is a digestible number    Terrible and calamitous   but manageable for the brain    Twenty-seven families    Twenty-seven childless stuffies covered in mud    Twenty-seven photographs and backstories and names    They have names    Little knock-kneed cuties smiling and laughing and turning cartwheels    

It is possible to withstand twenty-seven tragedies   twenty-seven graves   The finite nature of it    There is no God to appease in the case of disasters like this    No dictator for us to fail to seize    Though it tears us from our roots   we accept the absurdity    How a river can rip one home from its foundation   leave its barbecue sitting untouched on the houseless decking   deposit three school lunch boxes still in a row atop their kitchen bench two kilometres downriver

I don’t believe it’s because of the colour of their skin    Or their religion    Or even the physical distance    It’s because we are so vulnerable to story    And without it we are nothing    Deprived of the stories of 14,500 dead Palestinian children   our empathy starves   but here   where twenty-seven Texas families grieve   we are fed stories that make our blood run cold    Stories that hold mirrors up to us like all good stories do    I can’t scroll Instagram without crying   and it’s these Christian children and it’s these Muslim ones    These Jewish ones    The alive ones   they’re hungry    And afraid    They’re the next generation   and they are being either destroyed or radicalised by grief    We will all regret this in time    

Maybe it is easier to experience such loss in the midst of war   where everything is blowing up   losing its shape and substance    The mind cannot fixate on the single hole in the universe but must   instead   keep navigating change and catastrophe   one after another   dragging one’s grief like a dying dog on a lead but moving forward nonetheless    What I know is that I can’t look at it any more    Yes   it’s fucked that I can’t handle any more of other people’s grief   but there it is    Snowflake self    And the hollowed out heart of God