There's a wall in an ancient city. They called it the wailing wall. It's made of stones. People still press their foreheads to it, rock in silence, leaving notes in the cracks, and praying, not just for themselves, but for history, for forgiveness, for someone to be listening. A ruin made sacred by loss. And yet it's still just a wall. Stones layered by men, believed in by millions since hundreds of years.
Those stones have absorbed centuries of tears, centuries of whispered promises to a god who might be watching or might be as dead as the prophets who once walked these streets. Each crevice holds paper prayers, decomposing wishes, the desperate scratchings of faith trying to carve meaning from mineral. The believers press their flesh against rock as if osmosis could transfer divinity, as if stone could bleed mercy. They sway, these faithful, like wheat in a storm that never ends, their bodies metronomes keeping time to an apocalyptic rhythm only they can hear.
I watched footage of it, right after another segment, two kids, fighting over a piece of bread, not even looking scared anymore, just hungry, desperate. The kind of fight that looks normal when you've grown up under bombs. Their street was rubble.
Rubble as the wall, yes, as your sacred wall.
The same limestone, the same Jerusalem stone that built temples now crushes children's bedrooms. The same material that holds your prayers buries their toys, their mothers, their futures. Chemistry doesn't discriminate; calcium carbonate remains calcium carbonate whether it's sanctified or shattered. The kids wrestled in dust that was once someone's home, someone's church, someone's school. Their fingernails were black with it, this holy dirt, this consecrated destruction. One child's face was cut, blood mixing with tears and dust to form a paste, a primitive mortar binding him to this moment of survival that shouldn't be survival, should just be childhood.
And chaos. And blood.
You could still see smoke rising behind them. No one tried to help. The camera kept rolling.
The cameraman, that vulture with a lens for a beak, feeding on carrion moments, documenting the feast of suffering for viewers like me, comfortable voyeurs dining on disaster from safe distances. He zoomed in on their faces, these children who have learned to recognise the difference between phosphorus and regular bombs by smell alone, who know which rubble is fresh enough to possibly hide survivors, which smoke means chemical weapons. Their eyes were ancient, fossils of innocence preserved in ten-year-old faces. The bread they fought over was probably stale, possibly mouldy, certainly not enough for either of them. But hunger makes philosophers of us all; it strips away every pretence until only the animal remains, clawing for one more day, one more hour, one more breath.
I was eating an expensive dinner. I remember the taste of fine fish and white rice turning to metal in my mouth, bitter, hard to swallow.
Seared tuna, actually, rare in the centre, pink as a newborn's flesh, dressed in sesame and wasabi that burned clean through my sinuses. The plate cost more than those kids' families see in a month, if their families still exist, if 'family' means anything when you're counting the dead by neighbourhood blocks rather than individual names. My wine was a Sancerre, crisp, mineralic, notes of gunpowder, though the sommelier meant the terroir, not actual ammunition. The irony wasn't lost on me, sipping controlled explosions while watching uncontrolled ones. The fish turned to copper pennies on my tongue, oxidised blood, the taste of keys in your mouth when you're a child, back when putting metal between your teeth was the worst danger you could imagine.
That's what gets to me, not the violence itself, but the calm around it. How easy it is to pray to your god in the morning, then approve a strike by afternoon? And how people stand at a wall asking for peace, forgiveness, while across a rotting city another wall falls on someone who never even held a stone. Your fucking rubble.
The bureaucracy of annihilation runs on schedule. Morning prayers at seven, intelligence briefing at eight, target selection at nine, lunch at noon while coordinates are programmed into systems that never miss. The men who sign these orders have soft hands, manicured nails, they smell of aftershave and righteousness. They quote scripture between casualty reports, find precedent in ancient texts for modern massacres. Their children attend private schools where they learn multiple languages, none of which include the screams of the dying. They compartmentalise; the same mental architecture that lets them fuck their secretaries while wearing wedding rings lets them order deaths while wearing prayer shawls.
A stone is a stone. Future dust. A stone is what is left of your heart.
Every empire becomes archaeology eventually. Every temple, topography. Your monuments are tomorrow's mining quarries, your prayers tomorrow's punchlines. The stones don't care about your nationalism, your chosen people narratives, your manifest destinies. Entropy doesn't read religious texts. The same forces that ground mountains into sand will grind your certainties into doubt, your beliefs into barely remembered myths. In ten thousand years, archaeologists will sift through the rubble of this moment, find fragments of smartphones next to fragments of skulls, unable to determine which recorded the destruction and which suffered it.
This isn't a statement, nor a judgment. It's just the weight of watching. The helplessness of witnessing people turn faith into someone else's loss.
We're all complicit in our consumption of catastrophe. We scroll through genocide between cat videos, swipe past ethnic cleansing to reach restaurant reviews. The algorithm feeds us atrocity in digestible doses, careful not to overwhelm, careful to maintain engagement. We've gamified empathy, turned suffering into social media currency, where the right emoji reaction to a massacre proves our humanity while costing us nothing. We perform outrage for audiences of ourselves, curators of conscience in galleries no one visits.
We all do it in some way. We all let belief make space for violence, as long as it's far enough from our doorstep. Far enough to finish an expensive dinner.
The geography of grief has its own borders. We ration our tears by proximity, budget our rage by longitude and latitude. A death in our neighbourhood devastates; a thousand deaths across an ocean becomes statistics, background noise, dinner conversation that pairs well with red wine. We've industrialised indifference, made apathy into an art form. Our hearts have developed calluses, thick enough to deflect shrapnel that travels through screens, thin enough to bleed when our amazon package arrives late.
But one thing I know for sure, no one will forgive you, not even your deaf gods.
The universe doesn't keep score, but if it did, the arithmetic would be incomprehensible. No amount of prayer will unburn the phosphorus from children's skin, no pilgrimage will resurrect the dead from their mass graves, no ritual will wash the blood from the stones you kiss. Your gods went deaf from the screaming long ago, or maybe they were never listening, maybe divinity is just the story we tell ourselves to make the unbearable bearable, to transform chaos into cosmos, to pretend there's meaning in the meat grinder.
The wall stands. The wall falls. Somewhere, someone is mixing concrete for a new wall, a better wall, a final wall that will solve everything, that will separate the sacred from the profane, the chosen from the condemned, the living from the soon to be dead. But walls are just vertical graveyards waiting to happen, monuments to our inability to see each other as anything more than threats or targets.
Tonight, I'll sleep in clean sheets, in a room with walls that have never fallen, in a building that has never been targeted. The children from the footage, if they survived the day, will sleep in rubble, or they won't sleep at all, because sleeping means letting your guard down, and letting your guard down means maybe not waking up. Their lullabies are drone strikes, their nightlights are burning buildings, their bedtime stories are lists of the missing.
And tomorrow, people will return to that ancient wall, press their foreheads against stone, and pray for peace, pray for forgiveness, pray for victory, never understanding that their prayers and those bombs are made of the same fucking material: absolute certainty in their own righteousness, absolute blindness to their own barbarity.
The stones know better. The stones have seen it all before. The stones are waiting to become dust, to become rubble, to become the ground where nothing grows because the salt of tears has poisoned the earth forever.
This is not about choosing sides. This is about recognising that we've all chosen the wrong side, the side that watches, that witnesses, that washes its hands while the blood is still wet. We are all guilty of the greatest sin: believing our comfort is worth their coffins, that our safety is worth their suffering, that our stones are sacred while theirs are just rubble.
Future archaeologists will find our bones mixed with theirs, indistinguishable, equally dead, equally forgotten. They won't be able to tell who was chosen and who was condemned, who was terrorist and who was soldier, who prayed at the wall and who died beneath it.
All they'll find is dust, and stones, and the incomprehensible evidence of a species that learned to split atoms before it learned to share bread.