We Wounded and Warned Ourselves

We began the day in the eastern Congo, where some of us stormed a hospital in Byambwe and left at least seventeen of our own dead—women who had come for care, nurses who had come to heal. We built that ward together, and then we tore it open with gunfire and blades as if forgetting that anyone inside was part of us.

Before dawn in Kyiv, we sent missiles and drones into residential blocks and heating stations. Windows became shrapnel, stairwells became smoke tunnels, and six of us died without time even to run. Thirty-five more were carried out on stretchers, wrapped against the November cold we created.

Across oceans, we gathered our fleets for Operation Southern Spear, lining coasts with sailors and jets while the USS Gerald R. Ford pushed toward Venezuelan waters. We justified the killings of nearly eighty people on small boats as security operations, as if the absence of their names made the deaths easier to carry.

In Brazil, a court ruled that a mining giant could be held liable for the Samarco dam collapse that poisoned the Rio Doce ten years ago. Thousands of villagers and fishers who lost homes and livelihoods finally saw a legal door open—a reminder that sometimes we do try to repair what we break.

At COP30 in Belém, Indigenous leaders begged us to stop carving hydrocarbons from the Earth, warning that our extraction is becoming self-erasure. Yet in side rooms we defended new drilling rounds, trying to reconcile incompatible futures while the Amazon humidity clung to our suits.

In Tuzla, Bosnia, investigators explained how a cheap power cable wedged beside a bed sparked the retirement-home fire that has now killed fifteen of our elders. A radio meant to bring comfort became the fuse that ended their stories, a mistake so ordinary it is almost unbearable.

Later in the night in Nowgam, on the outskirts of Srinagar, our own seized explosives detonated inside a police station. Nine of us—scientists, officers, a tailor helping with paperwork—were killed instantly, and the blast flung human remains across a hundred meters of road and concrete.

California drowned under an atmospheric river that dropped inches of rain onto burn scars still raw from our wildfires. Amusement parks closed, streets flooded, and evacuation warnings echoed across Los Angeles. A single tree crushed a parked car, a small grace that nobody was inside.

In the Philippines, we filled the streets for another Black Friday of anti-corruption protests. Farmers rallied outside the Senate during hearings on flood-control graft, students marched from campuses linking corruption to climate disasters, and workers walked out of factories with placards demanding dignity.

Elsewhere we twined the ordinary through the catastrophic. Ethiopian labs confirmed Marburg virus in Jinka and health teams fanned through villages; a French skater broke the 5,000-meter world record; and Indian schoolchildren celebrated Children’s Day with paper roses and jokes about Nehru as if joy were a renewable resource.

We ended the day scattered but bound, realizing that every fire, flood, court ruling, protest chant, and missile strike was written by one author—us. We wounded ourselves in Congo and Kyiv and Tuzla, and tried to warn ourselves in Belém and Manila. If tomorrow is gentler, it will be because we decided to stop treating our own body as battlefield and bargaining chip.