The Sacrifice

I’m sitting here, coffee still warm, and somewhere a family is calculating which room has the fewest windows. Meanwhile, men on television discuss escalation like it’s a quarterly earnings report.

I keep telling myself it’s chess. Strategy. Long game. But chess has rules. This feels more like two men lighting matches over dry fields and calling it doctrine.

I watch the news and feel the voltage rise — the old chemical itch to write something long and incendiary. I want to name names, diagram the ego, drag the word deterrence into the alley and make it explain itself. Because if I can dissect it, maybe I don’t have to admit what it is to watch civilians become numbers. You’re not on the board until you are.

I’m sitting here, coffee still warm, and somewhere a family is calculating which room has the fewest windows. Meanwhile, men on television discuss escalation like it’s a quarterly earnings report — measured, necessary, contained. Bombs are never contained.

I get feral watching it. Not because I’ve mastered geopolitics, but because I understand gravity. Things fall. Buildings break. Seventy-year-old women don’t sprint toward safety.

My mind wants to build a manifesto tall enough to block the sky. It wants to call this what it is: domestic politics exported at gunpoint, legacy management dressed up as strength. But here’s the uglier truth — I’m furious because I’m helpless.

I can rage. I can connect dots until the page looks like a motel-room conspiracy board. None of it stops shrapnel.

That’s what collateral damage feels like from a distance. You’re not bleeding, but your nervous system is. You absorb shock without impact. You carry the static. Tomorrow the language will smooth itself out. “Response” will replace “retaliation.” Casualties will become figures. The tone will steady. We’ll be told this is leadership.

It feels like theater.

And the civilians — always the civilians — are the stage.