Listening.

There is a lot of pain in this place.

In their stories. In their eyes as they tell them.

In this place, death is sitting next to life,

as the dead resurrect through the living.

There is so much pain it’s barely bearable. The only thing that keeps me here is feeling that listening might someday make a change. But too many have come already, to listen – supposedly. And these guys are fed up with talking.

Each time, it seems, their stories are packed up and carried away, just to witness their own slow degradation into memories from the past, recluded and confined to a place far away. In the life of the listener, the narrator’s existence is limited to the duration of his narration. When he stops talking, the story ends. All that remains is a snapshot from the narrator’s life.

To the narrator, however, the pain stays. There is hardly a reason to believe that it would simply fade away. The wounds are too deep, the grievances too strong, the memories still too present, the injustices continuing. Systemic upheavals are necessary. Changes and reforms are needed in (and of) a criminal justice system that is undeserving of carrying the word justice in its middle.

Pain in the eyes of these men who saw too much suffering. Who caused suffering themselves, out of an urge to revenge suffering. Or prevent further suffering. Or both. Welcome to the vicious cycle of self-destructive violence. But when all you’ve seen is suffering, does your existence really matter anymore? Who would dare judge these men for desiring nothing more than payback, even if it comes at the price of their own annihilation?

When you come looking for the crime, be prepared to find suffering, pain and injustice. Be prepared to face your own demons. Or your own humanity. For violence is inherently human, knit into our bones, burned into our DNA. But from the perspective of your bubble of peace and safety, violence has been shifted to the realm of the extraordinary. To the margins of normality. Violence rarely interferes with your existence. Is that not the epitome of privilege?

There are things you cannot unsee. And I have always wanted to see. To see and understand. And learn. Even about the pain I knew I could never dissociate myself from. That has never been my intention anyway. I have come to learn and feel. And I can neither unsee, nor unlearn, nor unfeel. And if I could, I’d refuse to.

Power is inextricably intertwined with injustice. And power is a fatally misdistributed resource in this world. I have come to understand that pain and suffering are more bearable when there is at least some kind of power balance. When you can at least fight back. The only way retaliation becomes obsolete is through its replacement by a system that institutionalises and regulates it – a system that puts equality, justice and mercy above everything. But what if the system is worse than anarchy?

When the powerless are oppressed, the oppressor happens to be the powerful. Or at least an idle bystander, who can perhaps sometimes appeal to blindness or ignorance, but who is, more often, ashamedly aware of his complicity in the crime. In the face of injustice, neutrality equates to hypocrisy.

I will never be able to downplay their pain. Relativise it. I have chosen to trust, while preserving some of the necessary acumen to survive. I will remain adamant that listening requires laying yourself bare, as a minimal, symbolic gesture of reciprocity. Otherwise listening would be no more than a mechanical process for which a human intermediary would be superfluous. Worse, the process becomes exploitative, for the listener only takes what the narrator gives.

When I choose to listen, I choose to feel. I choose to trust.

And still, doubts will keep haunting me. What makes me in any way better than all the others who have listened before me? Will my listening really make a change someday? Or is all this not merely a manifestation of my own masochistic desire to feel pain? To wander through the entire spectrum of my emotional capacity? Is it to nurture my own stories? Is it intended to help me understand myself? What’s in there for me? And what for them?

I don’t know.

Yet.