Mixing tears

When volunteers get home from a project, they often have to deal with the experiences and the emotions they have lived during the last few months. When we are on the field, we don’t always have time to realize what is really happening, we try to decode feelings and we keep them in a corner of our hearts, in order to face them one by one at home, calmly. At least, it is what I usually do.
Yesterday, I read this text I wrote in a very difficult moment of my stay in Lebanon and during Aleppo’s “final assault”. Living this event at the camp, close to people who still call Aleppo home, has been tough: going through the despatches, watching pictures, scrolling messages from people stuck there… What should I do other than hugging them and mixing my tears with theirs? I always tried to be strong, to bring them a smile or some music to dance together, but that night a heavy cloud laid on my thoughts and I wrote this; I’m still into what I wrote because sharing means even to suffer together in order to stand up again. Together.

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My eyes are full of rage; my pen carves like a chisel; I need to scream. I want to scream because today I feel this bargain on my shoulder unbearable; my back hurts with picking up pieces.
By experiencing nonviolence, I learned how to transform my rage in creative energy, but like the majority of the paths that life submits to us it is hard and devious; tonight I decided to embrace this weakness and let the music shut those voices up. Tonight I’ll let the music shout at me in order to protect my silence; to defend and enjoy an hour of self-destructive energy.
If you live in a tent you are going to eventually feel like a caged lion and then the only thing you can do is to dance inside your head and dance hard, pushing back your tears because you know they are useless and, as everybody knows, tough guys don’t cry. You don’t even shoot away the flies that are eating your face because struggling is worthless tonight, they always win.
You wish you could go out and scream but nobody is listening. Just like that time they shot you, or that other time they said you were lying. Yet, you have every right to scream; you won’t try to list them, all the paper in the world won’t be enough.
You know it is a miracle you are still alive as if you were a cat with its 7 lives, but tonight this life is enough, maybe it’s even too much.
And therefore go survivor, let the music yell at you and dance inside your head until you cannot breathe anymore because tonight this life that has been given to you deserves to be squeezed with all its pain.