We Trembled and Remembered

I woke shaking in my northern spine today, when a 6.3-magnitude earthquake split the earth near Mazar-e-Sharif in Afghanistan. Twenty people died, more than six hundred were hurt, and the tiles of the Blue Mosque scattered like prayers interrupted mid-sentence. Dust turned the air brown, and I coughed through it, tasting old grief.

Across the sea, Typhoon Kalmaegi tore through the Philippines. Twenty-six of my children drowned in Cebu’s flash floods, while a rescue helicopter vanished into the swollen rivers of Agusan del Sur. In Nepal, an avalanche at Yalung Ri buried seven climbers beneath snow older than history. In Highland Papua, fifteen children were swept away trying to cross a rain-choked river. I can still hear the echoes of their laughter between the trees.

On the roads of India, trucks roared like monsters. One crushed a bus in Telangana, killing twenty. Another, driven drunk through Jaipur, left nineteen more dead. In Britain’s Cumbria, a hillside collapsed onto the West Coast Main Line, derailing a train and wounding four. I keep building arteries for myself, yet the blood still spills.

Hunger ate at me from the inside. In Sudan, the world finally dared to say the word: famine. El Fasher and Kadugli starved behind sieges while a drone strike on a funeral killed forty more. Twenty-one million of my Sudanese are hungry; three hundred seventy-five thousand are already beyond hunger. In Doha, leaders talked about ending poverty as the smell of dust and burnt grain drifted north.

In Gaza, I tried to bury my dead and couldn’t. Forty-five Palestinian bodies were returned in exchange for three Israeli hostages, but shelling still lit the night. Two teenagers were shot in the West Bank, one left to bleed in Hebron’s street. At the United Nations, new lines were drawn: Morocco’s autonomy plan for Western Sahara endorsed, old hopes of independence erased.

In the United States, I starved myself deliberately. The government shutdown reached day 34, and food benefits for forty-two million people vanished or halved. Lines curled around food banks, grocery scanners beeped empty. In Evanston, Illinois, a man was beaten by border agents in the street while neighbors screamed. My laws and my bodyguards forgot they were meant to protect me.

Farther south in Mexico’s Sinaloa, soldiers stormed a cartel safehouse—thirteen gunmen dead, nine kidnapped souls freed. Off Somalia’s coast, pirates struck again. And in Tanzania, Samia Suluhu Hassan took the oath of office after an election so lopsided it could only mean fear.

Elsewhere I hummed with circuits. OpenAI signed a thirty-eight-billion-dollar pact with Amazon; Microsoft secured nearly ten billion in new GPUs. My servers grew louder than my forests. Yet in Bengaluru, Nobel laureates spoke under banyan trees about building a future worth living in, and in Bogotá, thousands met to defend the right to choose when life begins.

In Madrid, Mexico’s Gonzalo Celorio won the Cervantes Prize, thanking language itself for surviving him. In Barcelona, Ferran Torres scored his fiftieth goal, and a stadium roared while rooftops in Cebu still glistened with floodwater. For a heartbeat, my grief and my joy shared the same breath.

I end this day knowing I am cracked and still alive. I am the quake and the rebuilding, the famine and the feast, the algorithm and the poem. I am humanity, and I am learning—again—how to hold all of myself without breaking.