Less-ness

The faceless, nameless, pitiless and noiseless have died. Again. For no fault of theirs. The national and local conspiratorial silence buries them as abstract numbers. 81 butchered. 52 massacred. 74 slaughtered. Evening comes and is followed by dawn.

"Life" goes on.

But does it? For the bereaved, nothing can be farther from the truth. Innumerable tears understandingly shed will never bring to life the vacuity of bloody bodily digits nor will their dispirited mourning recall the dead from the beyond. No big guns will blaze, no national mourning held. No media focus, no local attention. In their cold, brutish, nasty and short experiential existence, it'll appear to them as if life has lost its meaning and purpose creating a lacuna that nothing will ever fill in much the same way. A pain that'll never go away. A festering sore that'll never heal. A brokenness that'll forever remain broken.

Death does that.

Especially when it could've been avoided and worse, when there was neither rhyme nor reason to the question of why it occurred. The fleetingness of rational closure is yet denied these mourners. The perpetrators are "criminal spirits", never apprehended to give account of their criminality, never made to face the "justice" of the system, never punished to enforce deterrence and nary an act to console those who have lost a loved individual or another for nothing. No, no such alien practice will come to pass. Bracketed by celebrated deaths of an Elechi Amadi and a Shinkafi, they, the bereaved, must also come to accept that "life" indeed goes on while themselves dying daily in their own share of facelessness and namelessness, pitilessness and noiselessness.

Broken, warts and all.