It’s hard to read an article (linked at the end of my tweet) about people you knew, especially when the interview in it is given by your friend and you know exactly what he is talking about and about who he is talking because you remember those days too. It’s soon almost a year since we lost Jerry and I still remember when we got the news that we had lost him and one more guy, and there were others there who had survived but were not safely out yet, so we were all just waiting and keeping our breaths and hoping that the next news would be that they got evacuated and not that we had lost someone else too. I had not smoked a real cigarette for years but that day I smoked. I remember sitting there with the guys who knew them, everyone hurting in their own way and nobody really knowing what to say, so we just sat there and smoked and waited for news. Smoked another one and waited again. Hoping that two bodies would stay two because even writing that sentence now feels fucking horrible, but that is what we were waiting for that day. For the number not to become bigger. And then you read something like this from your friend: “He said Mozzie and Jerry were among the 29 close friends he had lost in Ukraine, but said more than a hundred people he knew well had died.” 29 close friends. I don’t even know how you are supposed to process that normally. And this is one of those things that is so hard to explain to people who are not here, because at some point after enough calls, enough names, enough funerals and enough times waiting to hear if someone made it out, something in you just changes. You become numb in a way and I don’t mean that you stop caring or that losing someone somehow becomes normal because it fucking doesn’t, every single person is still a person and someone you knew and someone who had people waiting for them at home, but I think your mind just starts protecting your heart because there is only so much you can take and still get up the next morning and continue doing what you have to do. Sometimes you don’t even understand how much of it you have pushed somewhere deep inside until something stupidly simple brings it all back, like reading an article, and suddenly I remember that day again and I can almost smell those cigarettes, remember sitting there with everyone in silence, checking the phone again and again and just wanting to hear that the others were out, because Jerry was already gone and there was absolutely nothing we could do about that anymore, but maybe at least we would not lose anyone else that day. Almost a year. Fuck… Never forgive. Never forget. thenightly.com.au/politics/e…