Another notification buzzes,
another headline screaming red,
another mother’s worst nightmare
bleeding through my phone screen
while I’m just trying to drink my coffee
and pretend the world makes sense.
Children running from classrooms,
hands over their heads like they’re playing
some twisted game of hide and seek
except the seeker has a gun
and the prize for being found
is a body bag.
A man at a podium,
words cut short by the crack
that splits the air like thunder,
like the sound of democracy
breaking its own spine,
falling forward into the microphone
that will never carry his voice again.
And here we are,
vultures in our living rooms,
picking apart the bones
before they’re even cold,
asking “what party did they vote for?”
before we ask “are they alive?”
I am so goddamn tired
of counting bodies
like poll numbers,
of measuring tragedy
by its political weight,
of watching us cannibalize
our own capacity for grief.
The children in Colorado
don’t give a shit about your talking points.
The blood on Charlie Kirk’s shirt
doesn’t care about your Twitter feed.
Pain doesn’t vote.
Fear doesn’t have a party affiliation.
Death is the ultimate bipartisan issue.
But we’ve made mourning
a competitive sport,
turned empathy into ammunition,
weaponized every tear
until crying becomes an act of war
and silence becomes complicity
and speaking becomes a target
painted on your back.
I want to rage
at the machine that feeds on this,
the endless hunger for division
that devours children’s safety
and spits out hashtags,
that swallows human decency
and excretes think pieces
about who deserves to bleed.
I want to scream
at every politician
who offers thoughts and prayers
with one hand
while counting campaign contributions
with the other,
who speaks of tragedy
like it’s weather they can’t control
instead of the storm
they helped create.
I want to shake every person
who sees a child crying
and asks first about their parents’ politics,
who measures the worth of a wound
by the ideology of the wounded,
who has forgotten that
blood is just blood,
that tears taste the same
no matter who sheds them.
But mostly I am just
bone-deep exhausted
by the weight of caring
in a world that has mistaken
cynicism for wisdom,
that has confused
choosing sides with choosing right,
that has forgotten the difference
between being strong
and being hard.
Tonight I will go to bed
knowing that tomorrow
another notification will buzz,
another headline will scream,
another family will learn
that normal Tuesday mornings
can end in forever goodbyes.
And I will choose,
again and again,
to see the humanity
in every broken body,
to grieve for every family
regardless of their flag,
to refuse the poison
of selective compassion,
to remember that
before we are anything else,
we are just fragile creatures
trying to make it through
another day
without losing
the people we love
to the madness
we have made normal.
Because someone has to remember
what it means to be human
when the world forgets.
Someone has to hold the line
against the darkness
that masquerades as discourse.
Someone has to say
that every life matters
not because of what they believed
but because they believed,
not because of how they voted
but because they breathed,
not because of who they were
but because they were.
And today,
in the face of everything,
that someone is me.
That someone is you.
That someone is all of us
who still remember
how to weep
without checking
if our tears
are politically correct.