Every day I toe the line, between the world is ending and my world is fine. But every moment of 'fine' is mirrored by some horrific war crime, out of sight but not out of mind. Every cup of clean water I give my children is a cup denied in Palestine. Some days the glass just shatters in my hand, and I can feel the blood flowing as keenly as if it were me and mine. As Omar From Gaza said, “There is a despair within us that, if distributed among the people of the earth, would kill half of its inhabitants.” I swear, it feels that way. It feels like dying.

Today is my daughter's birthday. I watched her and her friends dressed up as princesses, fussed over, fed constantly, given cool drinks, loved and hugged and smiling. It made me happy but also flooded me with such a melancholy. These ordinary moments are all polluted by the black mirror I carry around in my pocket, wherein, as a writer, I'm addicted to doing lines. I don't want to see atrocities in my most intimate moments but I see them all the time. Today my heart is just torn hearing of just the latest school bombing, 'Israel' killing people praying in a refugee camp, while the American Empire lies and lies. This isn't new, this isn't ending, and I swear it's ripping a hole in space-time. I can feel things far away and they're getting worse and worse all the time.

As much as I go about my day and live and laugh and enjoy things, when I put my hand in my pocket it comes out dripping with blood, every time. I try to wash it away, I try to wish it away, I try to write it away, but there's an endless supply. At the same time I see people with blood on their mouths, blood in their eyes, and they don't even wipe. People out here supporting and debating these atrocities, as if genocide is just another issue in a magazine in a loaded gun pointed at the world, as is their right. I feel a great and furious anger which has nowhere to go so I just feel like crying.

I read the contraband words of the Resistance, which give me comfort, but lately Empire is knocking on doors I know, sniffing around my life. We live in a time when those resisting a genocide are called terrorists, and it's dangerous to do what I was taught within Empire. Meanwhile those that persist in a genocide must be taken at their word, even when they're too lazy to even lie properly. Everybody's speech must be policed except for those inciting a genocide. This is the linguistic world I was unfortunately born into, where certain people are beneath mention and thus, beneath even dying. And where the underlying ecocide isn't even a crime. We're supposed to witness a completely razed land with a completely captive population, and not feel the empathy or prophecy in it at all. And yet the Genocide of Gaza is what White Empire will do to all of us, it's just a timing difference. It's really advertising, which actually means a warning if you read your seatbelts right. My feelings are the future, and nothing is going to be fine.

When I eat, when I drink, when I flush the toilet, the black mirror shatters and I know that people—people I know now—have none of these creature comforts at all. I must know, I must witness, that people like me are squashed, like bugs, beneath the bombs of White Empire, and that bugs themselves are squashed by the English language that has infected my mind. I try to unwind the words by writing, but language is a conversation and there's too many people and not enough time. As much as I write in black ink, the background is always more white. As I sharpen my metaphorical pencil I think, what's the point?

How am I supposed to go about my day when every day is just a number in this genocide? This is a rhetorical question because I do go about my day, but I've bifurcated my heart into two broken universes, one the heartbroken truth and the other the broken lie. I'm neither here nor there, and there's always something a bit off in my stare; like I see dead people, which I do, all the time. And these are just the distant deaths, I've got my own growing household of ghosts, because I don't know how to say goodbye. All I know is how to get through the day, and I just close my eyes to it all at night.

As a living soul, I feel like I have all the time in the world, but lately the programming is 24/7 dying. As a thinking man, I have all the information in the world, but it's all bad news or even worse people denying it. Then I have my daily life, which is milk-rice and birthday parties and ice-cold white wine and I just want to enjoy it. I'm a tropical prince but something doesn't fit. I know that everything should feel shit, but it doesn't and I feel shit about it. I've got that Siddhartha itch, but like 500 lives too early and I don't want to deal with it. I thought I had many lives left—to come back as a goose or a turtle or a deva—but we're killing all the animals and no one feeds the gods. Those bodies won't exist to be born into. We're all in deep karmic shit.

So I scratch and scratch my pen away, trying to itch away this vile sensation, but that only numbs the nerves for a minute. Then the feeling comes back because my body is connected to every other body on earth (literally gaze at your navel and think about it). Thus I don't just see the men, women, and children of Gaza dying, I feel it, just as I feel all the pain I don't see which is nonetheless happening. I can feel it quite literally, as my fingers touch the electrified keyboard that brings me this news, and as I type about it to you. Check your own retina for the signs; I scratch, you itch, if I'm doing it right. We, the cursed living, are being torn apart by a million scratches with no relief of death, just endless dying. We are living through a genocide. What a terrible time.