It has been a month and ten days since our divide began. A little context: I was 18 when I first felt cracks in the walls leave echoes in my gut, my memory, my worldview of human transience on this planet we call home. I still ache from the loss of a single life. Buildings razed, thousands dead, these are things unfathomable to me. As they are to you, I know. The cartoon pink and red hearts we exchange each day a reminder of how aligned we've been, mind and heart, in so many disagreements.
But now we're split. To you the existence of one country is...existential, as you put it. It must survive even if a thousand die, even if a city is reduced to rubble. I don't say the word peace to you anymore, as I rarely did to anyone anyway. Because --
My vision of peace is a terrifying one. To lay down your arms, violence, life itself, but to strive always for less harm, greater harmony. A continual melting of conflict in every way. This summer I lay by a smoke-covered lake and recognized that my anger at the flawed vacation was only a reflection of a deeper anger, one rising from the earth under my feet at the violence reflected in that smoke. My tears turned to lake water and those few hours lost to annoyance melted into recognition of a greater wound, one that consumed annoyance and turned it into grief, which is love. Growing harmony. We sailed hours later than planned, caught equally between smoke and water.
To execute this peace, over and over, with no guarantee that the other side will do the same, a continual melting away of self and strife into a whole that is still bigger, still flawed, but still here, requires more strength than war. To know that you can find your feet/identity/self even when you lose yourself in something beyond fear and religion and political boundaries.
I don't know if there is a cause or faith or country I feel so strongly about that I could condone a single death in its name. Perhaps it's out there, or so deep in my heart, that it will take something even more terrible than this for it to emerge. For me to say end this now, whatever it takes, in order to preserve whatever it is I hold so dear.
I wonder where this will end, both in the world and for us. I wonder where you will shift, how our echo chamber might shrink. And I feel for its edges and let life lap back at its edges, hearts fewer but flowing, trusting that this clash will wash away in life itself.
