The spring drizzle has been veiling everything now for some days, listlessly like it is being kind as it can to the blossoms that it picks out like studded gems. Through the window above my bed in the morning, on the juniper hedge where there are no blossoms, the rain formed its own in silver grey beads.
To work in vehicle with coffee. Automated prayers. The mind at work is a torpid heap. And there's thousands upon thousands killed in a quake on the other side of the world and counting, and more killed and counting in a cyclone; the destructive rate of the cyclone on a larger scale it seems to be, than the Asian tsunami in 2004. We receive it through ink on paper, on the news-stand; photos of fully dressed corpses, floating in flooded fields.
The drizzle is listless and regular. People zip in and out of lanes in the grey drizzle trying to get ahead of other cars that are already going over the speed limit, and so arrive at the red light further ahead before they do. Or so all their manouvering through traffic turns out to be: you have to wait at another red light. So why all the fast driving?
All that which I take for granted; heat, running water, running hot water, stove, fridge, bed, roof, clothes, food, could be depleted, deleted, in the span of the time of a single earthquake. In pretty much every hospital you pass by, unnamed babies are dismembered, screaming without any audible voice as they are pulled apart alive, butchered more wantonly than steers, in their mothers' wombs. And why such a disaster as we read about on the other side of the world shouldn't happen here all of a sudden, has an answer which our buffeted minds do not contemplate - or if they do, it's not for very long.
The drizzle falls. We are more naked than we know.
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