Words are not enough

Words are not enough, you need to be hugged and drunk and crying at the stairs of the art academy at 3 in the morning on a tuesday. 

You need to sit there with all your guilt and all your pain that you feel like you are not allowed to feel. 

With your friends and their pain that they are pushing away, that they think they are not allowed to feel. 

Sometimes words are not enough to soothe your soul, sometimes it needs a cigarette and mild trespassing. 

The times we are living in are eating us alive. My Feed is not the monster but a window into its stomach. It has been eating people alive for centuries. 

Has there ever been no war? 

What have we created for ourselves? 

You sit next to me and start crying and I feel more sane. If you cry maybe I can too someday. If you cry I feel less alone, less insane. If you cry it is still worth it to cry for it, isn't it. 

I can care for you now. The world becomes your pain, something I can phantom, something I can hug, cover in gentle words. Radical care is a form of resistance and I radically care about you. About you caring. 

I will not tell you to be happy, to look away, how could I if it's your people dying. I will not tell you I feel pity, even if I feel sorry, so sorry about the circumstances that got us onto these stairs. You and me and this group of friends that call themselves comrades. Call themselves rebels and activists. 

Who are we? 

You are brave, and kind. I remember the first time we talked. It was a protest in early Spring. I was impressed by your composure, by your gentleness, by the intricate stitched pattern on the traditional vest you were wearing. We talked about our life paths, about uni, about art. We are similar in so many ways, even though we do not look like it. The world treats us very differently. Yet, we ended up at the same place that day. 

Now it is late summer, my arm around you, a half empty wine bottle in front of us. Our friends discussing political theory serves as background noise. 

We are so similar and I wonder if this is the one thing that separates me from my family. 

Why am I here and my sisters are not? 

Why am I fighting and they see no point in that? 

Why I am sad and angry and disappointed and frustrated so many many times and they tell me to just be happy. To close my phone. To focus on myself. 

I am no better person than them, we grew up the same, I am not more intelligent then them, they have empathy, they are kind. 

But they don't sit on the stairs tonight listening to you saying everything you want is for it to stop. Everything you want is to step foot in your grandfather's house where your family had been living in for generations before they got displaced. 

When we met I met someone like me. We both studied Engineering wanted to study Art. We were always creatives, always drawing, painting, and expressing ourselves. We met marching, radically caring about our people. And our people are all people. 

We have so much in common, as we do with everyone around us. Maybe this is the difference. 

Your pain is my pain, your rights are my rights, your solidarity is my solidarity, because we are so similar. 

You could be me, and I could be you, if the circumstances were slightly different. You are my friend, my comrade. 

And I cannot be happy when you are not. 

I would rather sit on the stairs and shout in the streets. 

Until the same people have the same rights.