[post] When they show you the footage of the strike, the rubble, the...

When they show you the footage of the strike, the rubble, the numbers climbing on the screen, what they don't show you is the woman in the next apartment who hasn't slept in three days because she keeps hearing the sound. Not from the bombing—from the silence after. My neighbour's son was conscripted when he was twenty-two; he came back at twenty-four and lived in their apartment for five years without speaking. The generals and the journalists, they count the dead and the displaced and the infrastructure damaged, all things that can be measured and reported. But nobody counts the people who survive and then spend decades learning how to be alive again, or the people who love them, who have to learn how to hold someone who is only half-present. This is not sentiment. This is what I saw happen to families I taught, children who came to school and drew pictures of their fathers that looked like strangers. The human cost is not the cost to humanity—it is the cost to the specific person sitting across from you at breakfast, and whether they can still taste their food.