Whiteness and maleness are silent precisely because they do not need to be vocalized. Whiteness and maleness are implicit. They are unquestioned. They are the default. And this reality is inescapable for anyone whose identity does not go without saying, for anyone whose needs and perspective are routinely forgotten. For anyone who is used to jarring up against a world that has not been designed around them. 

Perhaps he was wrong to think of lamentation in terms of sincerity or insincerity, that perhaps the crying and wailing and sobbing all around him was intended not as an expression of emotion but as a kind of service offered to the bereaves, a performance in some sense but a performance that, together with the drums and the rituals, was meant only to help the bereaves with their own lamentation, to ease out, like the calm rhythmic words and from kneading hands of a midwife during a difficult birth, the tears that the bereaves so often found impossible to bring out by themselves.

Even now he felt ashamed thinking about his initial reluctance to acknowledge the magnitude of what had happened at the end of the war, as though he's been hesitant to believe the evidence on his computer screen because his own poor, violated, stateless people were the ones alleging it, as though he's been unable to take the suffering of his own people seriously till it was validated by the authority of foreign experts, legitimized by a documentary narrated by a clean-shaven white man standing in front of a camera in a suit and tie.

 Cry. It will wash the grime away. Duties and rituals and caste and religion are all grime. Let it all be swept away. Then you can cross the river. You will see the joy it brings. 

 To conclude that police forces are racist, and conclude that is an answer in and of itself, misses the more pernicious problem: that to be prioritized as a missing person you need social capital. And social capital is not an infinite resource. It is not equally available to everyone. This is a fundamental, structural failure of the way every single police department in the world handles violence against marginalized people. 

 Asking a community steeped in trauma to stare at a post-mortem trophy photo of one of their dead was a massive, unfathomable ask. 

 The word, lifestyle, always makes me cringe when it's applied to queer folk. As though it were describing a love for crochet or Caribbean cruises, It strikes me that collapsing such a core part of someone's identity into a signifier as fleeting a lifestyle also robs police and the public of a vital part of the picture. A detail that could help tie cases together and expose trends. 

My dear grandson, you will only truly understand the value of Schrödinger when the airports of the world search your heart, your pockets, the very pores of your skin, and leave you to waste away in their never-ending queues. Thankfully, our village is still a place where one can live and die as was intended; where light reflects and clean air reaches. If you are the wind, a bird, or even a stranger there, you're in luck, because you're still free, like those who are yet to be born.