How do people live there? You might ask yourselves. Where it’s so unsafe and extreme. You wouldn’t dare come for a visit, yet we stay. “Don’t go there”, our friends in New York warned us, but we had no choice.
Well, we do, live. The cafes and restaurants are packed. We suppress. Its hard work, I can tell you that.
We let our routine guide our lives; we go to work, take our children to their nurseries, to their schools, we visit our friends and go for a walk with our dogs.
As long as we have that routine, we can continue this delusion; our life is normal, we tell ourselves, just like any other.
Yet, there are signs. There’s the honking and shoving. There’s the swearing and sweating. There are armed guards everywhere - our guardian angels, opening our bags when we enter the mall, when we enter the restaurant, examining their content with a sharp eye for detail - those are our guardian angels, that keep us safe. There’s the neighborhood’s madman, shell shocked from one of the endless wars, his pants undone his shirt stained walking about screaming: “God bless” and kissing women’s shoulders.
We ignore these signs. This is our choice. Or maybe we have none, because in order to be able to live in such an environment that’s the only thing we can do: suppress, act as if none of this happens. As if the next bus is just another bus, and not the one that might explode, carrying within it the message of our own death.
That’s how we carry on with our normal life, and if a bomb explodes in a café near by, we stay in our sits and continue to sip our coffee silently, because that’s the only life we have, so we might as well live it.
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