What does it mean to witness suffering and feel it burn inside you
What does it mean to witness suffering and feel it burn inside you,
not as gentle empathy, but as a deep-rooted and screaming indictment?
There is a boy who carries cement as I carry metaphors — without question, without choice,
without allowing himself the luxury of another option, only with a resignation sculpted in silence.
He is not a symbol, not a story woven from words, but a breathing being,
a master of the mathematics of hunger, who has learned the philosophy of small joys,
in a world that never stops for his pain, that doesn't listen to his silence,
an entire universe that continues to spin, ignoring the burden he carries.
I see him, and my soul splits in two — one part mourning, the other marveling,
for what is humanity if not a living contradiction, a dance of paradoxes?
How can joy exist in the exact place where injustice flourishes and grows,
how can a smile be so sincere where pain has made its home?
He speaks of dinner with the grace of a saint, smiles as if he has made peace
with things I still wage war against in my mind, a prisoner of my own battles,
and I want to believe he is a glitch in a cruel system, but perhaps he is the truth,
and I am the illusion, a shadow of privilege that cannot see clearly through the veil of perception.
Perhaps we are not divided by privilege as much as by perceptions and illusions,
perhaps the question is not why he is content, but why I cannot be,
why my heart cannot find peace where he has made peace with destiny,
and in this reflection, I wonder if the truth is deeper than my beliefs.
Copyright ©
Dan Enache
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