Ditwah, Monkey Space, and the Night We Lifted Two Trophies

We are eight billion hearts, and today we beat unevenly. It is 29 November 2025, and we wake up scattered across ruins, floodplains, stadium seats and cabinet rooms, all of them ours.

In southern Gaza, we walk past the shattered streets of Bani Suheila. A drone circles above the al-Farabi school where two of us, brothers Juma and Fadi Tamer Abu Assi, went out to gather firewood and never came home. A small weapon fell from a clear sky and turned them into another entry in a war log where the total Palestinian dead in Gaza has climbed beyond seventy thousand. We are the boys on the gurneys at Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis, and we are also the thumb that scrolls past their names on a phone in another country.

We hold their mother's hands as she screams in a crowded ward, and at the very same moment we sit on soft couches continents away, adjusting the brightness of a screen so the images hurt a little less. We tell ourselves we are only reading the news, but it is our own body we are watching bleed and our own attention we let wander.

Far to the southeast we wade through brown water in Sri Lanka, where Cyclone Ditwah has torn down hillsides and poured rivers into living rooms. By tonight officials count at least 153 of us dead, 191 missing, and more than half a million affected. We stand in Malwana near the Kelani River with Mallika Kumari, who climbed into a hired lorry yesterday with three children and a couple of plastic bags when the water climbed the stairs faster than she could pray.

We huddle with Mallika in a school that has become a relief centre, one of nearly 800 across the country. Navy boats nose past half-submerged houses, rescuing neighbours and stray cats. In Dalugala Thakiya, we stir rice and dhal in huge pots in a mosque kitchen, trying to stretch every ladle because no one has been able to work all week and the notes in our pockets are already promised to debts.

Across the Malacca Strait, we rake through mud and broken walls on Indonesia's Sumatra island. Under the rare cyclone Senyar, entire slopes have slid away. Our disaster agency tallies at least 303 of us dead in the floods and landslides here, with more bodies still under soil and boulders, and we hear of two more deaths in neighbouring Malaysia. We are the excavator operator reopening a mountain road in North Tapanuli and the child in a mosque-turned-shelter clinging to a damp schoolbag because it is the only thing that still feels like a future.

In the United States, in Stockton, California, we throw a birthday party for a two-year-old at a banquet hall called Monkey Space. There are pink and blue balloons, a cake on a folding table, about a hundred of us gathered under string lights. As the candles are about to be lit, gunfire tears through the music. When the sirens finally fade, four of us are dead and thirteen wounded, seventeen shot in total. Two of the dead are eight-year-old girls, Journey Rose Reotutar Guerrero and Maya Lupian, another is 14-year-old athlete Amari Peterson, and the fourth is 21-year-old Susano Archuleta, who died trying to herd children into a closet.

We are the toddler hiding under a plastic table with frosting on our cheeks, the parent pressing a jacket against a wound, the neighbour who thought the first shots were fireworks. We are also the city that will add another mural, another vigil, another set of names to a list already too long to fit in a single breath.

Further south, in the Mexican city of Tula in Hidalgo state, we slip into the La Resaka bar to end a long week. Armed men crash through the door, raise their weapons and leave seven of us dead on the floor and five more badly wounded before disappearing into the night. The authorities speak of fuel-theft gangs and rivalries; our families speak instead of funeral costs, school uniforms, and who will raise the children who were supposed to be in bed before midnight.

In Tunis, we chant under a grey sky until the police lines close in. We are Chaima Issa, poet and opposition figure, already sentenced in a mass 'conspiracy against state security' trial to twenty years in prison. Officers in plain clothes push us into an unmarked car to enforce the verdict. Dozens of other critics, lawyers and businesspeople share our fate with sentences stretching up to forty-five years. As the door slams, we are also the ones in the crowd shouting our name, and the ones at home insisting in comment sections that this is what security looks like.

Later the same day, in Turin, Italy, we surge up the steps of La Stampa's offices behind a banner. Around a hundred of us force open doors, scatter papers, and spray-paint 'Free Palestine' on newsroom walls. The building is empty of journalists because the media is on strike, but our anger fills the rooms anyway. That evening, President Sergio Mattarella, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and opposition leader Elly Schlein all condemn us for attacking press freedom. In that condemnation we are both the protesters accusing reporters of complicity and the editors sweeping glass from their desks, wondering how to keep telling stories without becoming the story themselves.

In Afghanistan's Badakhshan province, in the remote Maimai district, two of us sit in a pickup truck on a narrow mountain road, Chinese workers attached to a gold project. Gunmen ambush us, fire, and vanish into the rock and darkness, leaving us dead on the track. In Kabul and Beijing, other parts of us open laptops, adjust risk assessments and update spreadsheets for foreign investment, each row a number that was a life and a family and a language.

On the West African coast in Guinea-Bissau, we stand at a podium in uniform while a decree is read out naming a 28-member provisional government. Soldiers loyal to General Horta Inta-A have already pushed President Umaro Sissoco Embaló into exile in Brazzaville in the Republic of the Congo. In a different neighbourhood, armed men raid the PAIGC party headquarters, and we are the staffers lying on the floor as boots thunder past and the idea of democracy in yet another country thins like paper rubbed too many times.

In Nicaragua, some of our prison doors open only halfway. Around forty political prisoners are taken from crowded cells and driven not to freedom but to their homes under house arrest. We are José Alejandro Hurtado stepping into the sunlight to hug relatives while police cars idle at the corner, and we are the judge who signs the order that says we must report regularly to the very forces that jailed us. We call this progress and reassure ourselves that supervision is not the same as fear.

And somehow, in the same twenty-four hours, joy insists on existing. Under the lights of Ikon Park in Melbourne, we crowd into the stands for the AFL Women's Grand Final. The North Melbourne Tasmanian Kangaroos overpower the Brisbane Lions, winning 9.2 (56) to 2.4 (16) and becoming the first back-to-back premiers in AFLW history. We watch Eilish Sheerin burst from half-back and earn best-on-ground honours, we hug strangers in blue and white stripes, and for a few quarters of football all that matters is the clean sound of leather off a boot.

Far away in Lima, at the Estadio Monumental, we flood the terraces in red and black for the Copa Libertadores final. Flamengo edges Palmeiras 1–0 on a 67th-minute header from defender Danilo, claiming a fourth South American title and becoming the first Brazilian club to reach that mark. We light red flares, sing until our throats ache and call ourselves tetracampeão, while another part of us in a green shirt slumps against a bar counter and says, 'maybe next year' with a tired smile.

So this is who we are today: two brothers in Gaza whose names most of us will forget; aunties in Sri Lanka scooping floodwater out of their homes; exhausted rescuers on Sumatra counting our dead by the village; parents in Stockton rewriting birthday speeches as eulogies; drinkers in Tula who never make it home; protesters and prisoners in Tunis and Managua; miners in Badakhshan; party workers in Bissau; editors in Turin; fans in Melbourne and Lima drenched in beer and victory. We are kindness and cruelty, competence and chaos, stage lights and emergency sirens, all happening at once. As the date slips from 29 November into whatever comes next, we lie awake listening to rainfall, distant gunshots and fading stadium chants, and we wonder, quietly and collectively: tomorrow, will we be a little less dangerous to ourselves?