Syria or Me

SYRIA OR ME 8 July 2016 . “There’s no safe place in Syria” keeps banging against the inner wall of my skull . . . yes, banging, crashing, echoing, reverberating .. . .

yet, I am going to be asleep in minutes, warm and safe, probably to fly sweet dreams . . . or to sleep dreamlessly, as deep as the dead . . . and tomorrow, more than likely, I won’t remember Syria’s plight . . . until the next news bulletin . . . and I call myself a compassionate person (“And Brutus is an honourable man”). How do I hold my head up to the sun-soaked sky? . And yet, this is the dilemma I have never managed to grasp my whole life long of doctors, nurses, veterinary surgeons, trauma volunteers of all kinds . . . How can you be loving enough to care and hard enough to handle it? . An ex-paramedic boyfriend said, “You distance yourself from the sufferers” but how? . Perhaps as I am doing now about Syria . . . . Perhaps my sudden tears are not for the horrors of Syria, but the horror of the hardness that is me!