Letter to my husband - 13/11/15

I'm getting ready to go to bed, and just thinking about how much I wish you were here tonight.

I feel like you have a phenomenal talent for being away when the world explodes. ;-) I don't remember exactly what happened before, but tonight I'm feeling your absence very intensely.

The world is a very difficult place to be some days, and today - tonight - came with so many awful and repugnant flavours of heartache. Your embrace doesn't make that heartache disappear - it just helps remind me there's some light beyond the gloom.

There's a line by Simon Kuper - an FT correspondent in Paris - about tonight. And it's rattling in my head:

I don’t think this is a clash of civilisations. I see it as a clash of a couple of thousand jihadis with a great city. The problem — as we saw in former Yugoslavia, or in Lebanon — is that it only takes a few men with guns to make a place unlivable.

I was never afraid after terror attacks, in the news, in my own city, or anywhere. I've walked past policemen disabling wired packages in Westminster and at the UN, I never felt afraid being in NYC after 2001. But that quote - makes me afraid of what I am beginning to see that our world is starting to turn into. I'm fine with living with no guarantees - no one has any, and to think otherwise is insanity. 

But it's the cities - and civilization, and culture, and life, and that world - and I wonder if this could ever disappear. I don't think Paris is just going to suddenly stop being Paris. But I'm beginning to think that life going on just as it did isn't something we can take for granted anymore. After attack after attack after attack continues....some of this life will get chipped away. And when it starts to chip away, what will stop it from crumbling altogether?

Some very dark thoughts on a very dark night. 

All my love.