More Bombs

Last night saw the eighth attack in five days.two bombs went off in Lahore in this place called Allama Iqbal Town, in the middle of what is a very busy area.twenty nine more people died, and about forty five others were admitted into a hospital with critical or minor wounds.

It's too much to take. I don't even know what to write anymore. I don't seem very capable of coherent thought in my head anymore. All i can feel is this distant numbness, a part of my consciousness that refuses to accept that this is all happening to ME.my hometown.my country. All that ever goes through my head, is, 'how is someone my age..heck.how is someone ANY age, supposed to be able to deal with this murder.there's no other word to call it. it's murder.it's out and out slaughter,and it's murder in cold blood. How can ANYONE go through this, and not be emotionally and psychologically scarred to some degree?!Because I know I am, and more than I ever let on to anyone. The nightmares. Crying into my prayers. The constant sense of impending doom. It's become so deeply ingrained in who I am now. I scarcely remember what it was like to be carefree; those days seem like a lifetime away. Someone else's lifetime.

I try not to think about it and just move along with life. Love and life may have been lost, but the world keeps on turning. So I smile my way through the pain. I go to school.Or university,i guess.I may be eighteen and in college,but I still feel the same as I did when I was thirteen or fourteen. It'll always be school to me. So. I go to school. I deal with a further sense of chaos when I look into all those made up faces and beaming smiles and know I'll never be one of them. Not them, with their perfectly made up faces and their constant swearing because it's 'oh so cool' and their obsession with boys. I know I'll never be one of them because I know what I want in my life. What's left of it anyway. And I want substance. Meaning. Something they can't give me. Though how I'm supposed to find substance amidst all this death and destruction is beyond me. I'm not even sure if my world will still be the same as it was when I wake up. What if there's a sudden burst of white light and next thing I know, I'm floating over my own lifeless body? Or worse, much worse. What if I wake up and I'm staring down into someone else's lifeless body? Someone I care about? How do I live through that? Because we're all under threat. Some of us more than others. And since my dad's a miliary man, he among many other senior official are threatened personally. So yeah. Big ball of laughs there huh.

What scares the heebie jeebies out of me most is giving into this fear. Though a part of me think's I've already resigned myself to it. I'm pretty scared to death that Allah will find that I'm lacking. That my faith's incomplete. That I should give in to His Will, whatever it may be, and place my Trust in Him. And I DO trust Him. I do. But maybe it's not enough. Maybe I need to give more. I am seriously afraid that He's going to think I'm a weak person for not staying calm and saying to myself 'Trust in God, it's going to be okay.Just TRUST.'

Which is not to say I don't. Because I do. But somedays it's easier to calm down yourself with that thought than others.

It can't be religious fanatics that are doing this. I know this because when you see a war like this firsthand, you know that there's more to it. No MUSLIM, good or bad, is capable of this kind of genocide. No MUSLIM, would file into a mosque for Friday Prayers with a lot of other civilans and military personell in what is a military based Mosque, and then, midway during prayers, start firing blindly into the crowd. No MUSLIM, would listen to a father beg to let his five year old son go, his son that he's brought to a mosque to pray for the first time, and then answer that appeal by shooting the little boy first point blank in front of his father, and then the man.No MUSLIM, would ask all the children present in the mosque to lie on their stomachs on the floor, and then shoot them all in the back to death.No MUSLIM, would storm through the curtains seperating the men and women praying quarters, and kill all the praying women too. No Muslim would do that. Not for all the money, not for all the motivation in the world. Not even a religious fanatic can carry out such a specifically targeted killing. This wasn't just a bombing carried out by a madman. This was cold blooded murder, and hundreds of us, including myself, lost people we knew and cared about that day.

I don't think I can write about this anymore. Thinking about this only makes it all the more worse and I can't afford to be distracted right now. I have three assignments and a presentation to work on for univeristy tomorrow. Normal kids have studies to worry about. Pakistani kids get to have schoolwork as the least of their worries. Lucky us. We're too busy worrying about whether we'll be around to submit the darned stuff at school or work or college the next day.

Remember to pray everyone. We are all people, no matter where we live, or what we believe in, and we're entitled to live our lives in relative peace and security. Pray that my people earn that right someday. Pray that I do. Because nobody has the right to take that from us. Nobody.