The news counts bodies, but it does not count the man who comes to my shop three times a week and now comes once, because his nephew was killed and he cannot bear to walk past the street where the boy used to work. It does not count the mother who buys half the sugar she used to buy because there are fewer mouths to feed. These absences, these small silences in a routine — this is where the war actually lives, not in the numbers they read on the evening broadcast. I have seen this before, in 1967, in 1982. The cameras leave. The street remembers. The notebook where I write credit remembers. That is the human cost — not the moment of death, but the years after, when a man learns to walk past an empty doorway without stopping.
0