25 april

refugees in the waves

After a long bike ride, I got to sit in a bench looking towards a dutch lake. It is sunny, and there is some wind. This small lake has then waves. 

Waves.

An infinite army of soft rounded soldiers born from the depth again and again, marching on. A well regulated stampede of watery hills going and going and going. The living things letting them through, moving with them, surging or sinking with them. 

Waves. 

The first time I ever got my fingers on the keyboard to write a page was to write about people on the move, illegal migrants as we like to call them. I remember an abandonned container, I still think in the slow asfixiation, consciousness falling away, the deep pain in the chest, the hope to the last second of a door that will open with air and perhaps even some help. The door that never opened. 

Today, a couple of decades later, I read about an alarm in the mediterranean, I read about the impossible decision of the captain from the last remaining rescue ship, the decision to which sinking boat full of people to go and try to rescue, I read about their arrival at the wreckage point, I read that they arrived late, always too late. To a few pieces of flotsam, to bodies floating in the water of this “sea of us” as the romans named it. To no survivors.

I see the persons, hanging to the few floating remains of the wreckage. It is night, there is wind and there are waves. Waves, waves like the armies that have been set to defend our frontiers from these people coming, waves that never stop, waves hitting the bodies again and again, till the grip soften, till the water breaks through the mouths and go down their throats. The sharp pain in the chest, a last attempt at shouting that is nothing but a soft gargle. 

Waves

A few bodies floating, some more going slowly down, less and less affected by the waves, sinking to a bottom undisturbed, lying in their last repose. Above the sun is shinning and I am getting ready to go biking, to admire the delicate rhythm of the dutch waves and their play with this sun, and the birds. Me, the one that escaped the argentinian and venezuelan butchers. I made it to the shore.

They didn’t