Srebrenica - In Memoriam (July 11th)
Justice is a slippery slide, one made of smooth stones, with few branches to grab onto while climbing. Your legs slip, and you feel the bruises on your hips, your torso. You feel the agony of reaching for the top, reaching for something that is in your field of vision, but it remains unfocused and aloof, like a vision in the first hours of the darkness, as the wetness of the cold stone wall keeps slipping beneath the soles of your feet.
Justice lets you grab onto crooked branches. It allows you to pull up just a little, so that you can see the prophecy of the meadow with the yellow flowers and the gentle breeze ruffling the strands, on top of the wall that remains covered in wetness from the tears of your loved ones, your friends, from moisture of sweat sliding down your face, perpetuating the slipping, down to the bog that surrounds this lurid construction of the natural order of things. Branches snap along the way, and as you keep trying, as you keep pulling thinner and thinner twigs from the cracks in the stone, that only seems stronger with each protrusion and each lesion in its surface, you do not give up, yet justice, remains wet and liquid and intangible.
We all climb the impossible ravines, and we all look for the meadows where we can meet those who deserve every blade of soft grass laid at their feet. We climb, and we peek, and we keep struggling to stay upright until a waterfall washes us away and carries us down the river of waiting.
Each edge is the same, for all of us, some steeper, some larger, some more crooked, but all remain at the center of our existence. Mothers of Srebrenica have a crest that they’re trying to reach until one by one they disappear down the rapids destined for them.
This is for the children who died that July 11th, without someone to hold their hand, alone with the monsters who smiled their crooked smiles while they watched light disappear from their eyes, once bright and full of the wonder of the world surrounding them.
Forever, it remains true, that humans carry impenetrable armor that prevents pleading and goodness to soften the tissue beneath when the monster awakens. Justice is an illusion stuck on the peak we are trying climb. We rise, and we slip, and we slide down its slopes. It's unreachable. It's a painkiller that masks the symptoms. We are told it exists, but the cure never enters our veins, because loss remains embedded in the bones that do not let chemicals touch the marrow center.
This is for you. So that I can carry the crest, the meadow, and the river out to you, if the eternity stretches that far, if the space occupied by your soul and mine constricts itself and lets us touch what seems denied in this axis-laden world.
Sleep tight, until the wetness evaporates, until dryness forces skin to shrivel into the supple earth until I lie groggily in my cavern, my vessel.
