“There is beauty yet in this brutal, damaged world of ours. Hidden, fierce, immense. Beauty that is uniquely ours and beauty that we have received with grace from others, enhanced, reinvented, made our own. We have to seek it out, nurture it, love it. Making bombs will only destroy us. It doesn’t matter whether or not we use them. Bombs will destroy us either way.” The End of Imagination, 1998, Arundhati Roy


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This morning I want my words to cry, my sadness to run down these pages, scrolling through an intense, disillusioning, consuming despair. I want the reflection of this monitor to show my vapid eyes, an overcome expression. I want this unfeeling machine to implode from the intensity of the emotions bleeding through my tapping, typing, fingertips. We woke this morning or we went to sleep this evening in a murderous world, a world of hate, killing. Assassination.

Pictures of her coffin. Ensuing riots. Outrage. Chaos. Speculation about what went wrong, how this was allowed to happen, what will happen now in an already tumultuous political climate. Graphic designers walk us through her final steps. Elections on January 8th. Nuclear security. Photos of her life. Terrorism. Extremists. Condolences and apologies, promises for investigation, public condemnations, vows of vengeance, blame.
If there are ever, I do not know, but today there surely are no sufficient words of consolation. Interrogations might find out who planned this attack, but they can’t tell us how much bad there is in the world. We know. We’ve just witnessed.

No energy for this. Exhausted. A moment that makes you believe in nothing.

Alex asked me about things in Pakistan. I hadn’t checked the news. I told him it was just politics as usual, thinking she were still alive and that he was referring to the approaching elections, political posturing, power hungry dictator. I checked the newspaper and was uppercut by a heavyweight headline.

Dead.

My knees wobbling, already in the 8th round of a title bout against Holiday Time Homesickness, I smashed against the canvas, not out for the count, but infected with a feeling that will take a day to pass. This hit landed before the bell, below the belt.
I never met Benazir Bhutto. I am not from Pakistan. People are murdered all the time. In large numbers people die tragic deaths. Yet something about watching that web page load screamed into my soul of a world so sick, so wrong, so polluted that today I want to disengage, to refuse this world, to fold my hand, to be 7, to be lied to and told that everything will be ok.

That groups -- groups made of human beings -- are competing to take claim for killing her. That most of my colleagues flip past this news to the “year in films lookback, the 25 most influential Bollywood films of the year” (can there be 25 most influential films in a year?). What is going on in the world when people compete for credit of an assassination? What is really going on in the world when this doesn’t phase people? That that man stood in the crowd with explosives strapped to his body and a sense of duty or right-doing planted in his mind, the goal of killing her and as many others as possible, maybe in the name of god, that somehow this action was justifiable, or right, that he pulled the trigger.

Today I want my words to cry.