Hello, Humankind

I dig with bare hands, nails broken, skin torn, stone after stone after stone. The dust fills my lungs but I breathe it in anyway, because maybe, just maybe, a voice will answer back.

I whisper their names into the rubble, each syllable a prayer, a plea, a knife. I press my ear to the ground, hoping to hear a cough, a cry, anything that means life still lingers beneath this graveyard of walls.

But silence answers me. Silence and the echo of what once was, a mother’s call from the kitchen, the rustle of her dress as she moved, the warmth of her hand guiding mine.

yet I call out, a name, a cry, a memory, hoping the rubble will answer back.

But the only reply is the echo of my own voice, bouncing off broken walls, mocking me with the silence.

I claw deeper, my fingers bleeding, my soul unraveling. I imagine I hear it, a cough, a whisper, a child’s laugh, but it is only the ghosts of what used to be.

I find a hand at last.

Her hand.

My mum’s hand.

I hold it as if holding could bring her back. Ash clings to her skin, her fingers stiff, fragile, a color no hand should ever be.

I press it to my face, beg it to move, to close around mine just once more. But it is stone now, and the warmth that once wrapped my world is gone.

Around me the ruins mock what used to be home. The table where we laughed, splintered wood. The door where she once stood waiting for me, ripped from its hinges. The bed where she tucked me in, buried in dust.

Memories are shadows here,

and I,

their unwilling witness.

Is this all we are worth?

Is this what it means to be human now?

to watch your family turned to rubble,

to hold your mother’s hand and feel it crumble in your own,

while leaders play monsters and the world plays blind?

This is not life.

This is not fair.

We are humans too.

Or did you forget? Did you trade our lives for your comfort, our screams for your silence, our mothers for your monsters?

Are we so cheap, humankind?

Are we less than your comfort, your silence, your headlines? Are monsters all you see now, while children slip through your fingers like dust?

We are humans too. Do you remember that? Or have you traded compassion for politics, hearts for stone? Are we so worthless that our screams vanish into silence? Are the monsters in power all that matters now?

We are humans too.

We loved, we laughed, we dreamed, just like you. And now I stand with my mother’s hand in mine, her and my entire family's silence echoing louder than any bomb,

and I ask you, "world" :

When did you forget what it means to be human?

When did you forget that it could be you, digging through rubble, praying for a voice, and finding only ash?

Wake up.

Hear us.

See us.

We are not numbers. We are families, we are children with dreams, mothers with tenderness, fathers with hope.

Wake up. Remember us.

Before the last memory of love is buried with the rubble.

Wake up. Before all that makes us human is lost.

.

.

Aura 🍉

683 days.