After an explosion at a pit mine the shocks that hit you are visceral. The air is knocked out of your lungs. Your mind trys to make sense of the destruction, the upending of what had been a logical, methodical and mechanical process, but your synapses refuse to acknowledge the strewn wreckage is the bits and pieces and chunks of the things that allowed a certain reality to function, day in and day out.
When you left the pit and when you buried the dead you sat and wondered what would follow, what comes now. You shuddered next and then you cried softly at first but eventually you began sobbing uncontrollably. In the old days they would have called it shell shocked. Now they call it post-traumatic stress disorder, personal exposure to a serious injury rendering basic social functioning impaired.
Yeah I have been in a fog for a couple of days. I have PTSD I think from observing the injury to something that has been a part of my soul for decades, the belief that Americans wanted to move forward and not backwards. The idea nestled in my heart and soul of each person being promised freedom of religion, of being assigned value based on who they individually were, of being respected for what they stood for and of being lauded for what good they accomplished has sustained a mortal blow.
This ain’t the blues. The pains I feel in my body every single day don’t compare with this. No I am so far from alright (to quote Marcellus in Pulp Fiction) I couldn’t even describe it to you.
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