Dumbfounded, adj.

Not confused. Not blank. Not stupid. But mute in the face of what should not still exist but does.

Photo by william f. santos on Unsplash

So, here’s the thing they don’t tell you when you finally claw your way out of the nihilistic trench claw as in literal, as in fingers cracked and dirty from years of scrabbling for footholds in the smooth, marble walls of a collapsing cosmology not some poetic clawing, but the kind that makes your gums bleed and your soul wince. They don’t tell you that the real horror is not that meaning died. It didn’t. The real horror is that meaning lived. Meaning persisted. It grows like mildew between floor tiles no one scrubbed after the flood. It rises, fetid and radiant, from the corpses of certainty and good taste.

It grew.

It spread.

It made itself at home among the corpses of taste and certainty and academic detachment.

And it came back.

And not as a gentle whisper but as a stink. A reek. A stench so potent it knocks the air out of your lungs just when you thought you’d gotten used to breathing again. Melted plastic. Melted promises. Bureaucratic rot. And, right in the center of all that grotesque reanimation, something sacred. You glimpse it. A flicker. A breath

Because sometimes, right in the middle of everything grotesque, right when the air smells like melted plastic and bureaucratic decay, you see something holy. And then you have to carry that holiness around like a bleeding organ in your bare hands, praying nobody sneezes near it.

And I hate it.

I hate that I’m still surprised. I hate that awe can crack through this brain like a fault line, even now. I hate that in the middle of bombastic laughter from people who’ve appointed themselves the moral custodians of evolution. I can still fall bewildered.

That there is love.

Still.

Even here.

Even now.

I hate that awe can still slip its fingers between the folds of this overcooked brain and pry it open like some shellfish. I hate that I’m not desensitized. I hate that I can still be cracked by kindness so reckless it makes the humanoids snicker from their SUVs.

---

We are standing where it happened. You know the place. You probably watched it live. Or read a think piece about it written by someone who never learned to conjugate pain. It smells like wet drywall and the kind of grief that calcifies in joints. There’s a breeze, somehow, and it is carrying the faint rot of unrealized futures and something else a sizzling, scorched smell, like burned-out synapses. The kind of place where hope feels pornographic.

Behind the police tape they’ve lined up again. The humanoids. Glossy-toothed. Hydrated. Devastatingly well-moisturized. They hold up phones like relics. They are photographing the ruins like it’s a theme park of cautionary tales, like they’re preserving it for posterity and Pinterest. One of them wears a T-shirt that says “Survival of the Fittest” in glitter font.

I nearly retch.

You and I are not the same, but we both know about silence. The kind that chokes. The kind that follows detonation but before the screaming starts. The kind that takes up residence behind the eyes of children who have seen too much too young. And here’s where I confess: I came here for you. I needed to know someone else still recognized opprobrium when it was wearing a necktie.

Because I’m dumbfounded, see? Not stupefied. Not confused. Dumbfounded. Rendered speechless by the ineffable fact that there is still love here. Because in the middle of all this this burnt-out wreck of moral vocabulary and cognitive cowardice there was love. Still. Actual, inconvenient, radiant love. That someone shielded a stranger’s body with their own. A human body bent over another human body to absorb impact. A girl named Lana held a girl named June and whispered “It’s okay” while a tornado of cruelty filmed it for internet points.

And what am I supposed to do with that?

They are sneering now. At the prayer candles. At the teddy bears. At the profligate display of emotion. At the tears that, to them, represent weakness. Because they’ve swapped out integrity for sententious platitudes and call it moral clarity. Because to them, compassion is a flaw in the operating system. Because they believe grief is a performative indulgence unless it aligns with branding and is sponsored by a tech firm. Vulnerability is a feature best toggled off.

And you standing beside me like a goddamn lighthouse in a fog of algorithmic cruelty. You are the reason I haven’t let go of this heart yet. You make me want to remember. All of it. Every godforsaken detail. The girl with the lime green hoodie who handed her granola bar to the boy bleeding from the elbow. The man who dug five feet with a bent shovel. The woman who sang while the sky collapsed.

Love.

It isn’t soft. It is not gentle. Not sentimentalism. Not the Hallmark-industrial complex. It is fierce. It is belligerent in its tenderness. It defies entropy. Love as the ultimate heresy in a system built to punish anything that doesn’t scale. It is not some meretricious Valentine’s Day hallucination. Love as something they still can’t synthesize, can’t program, can’t mine for ad revenue. It is what the humanoids cannot replicate with their AI and their algorithms and their fucking theories of meritocracy.

And maybe that’s why they laugh.

Love.

And I, God help me, I am furious. Righteously, molecularly, cosmically furious. I want to shake the sycophants by their shoulders and ask them if their evolutionary superiority feels warm at night. I want to tell them that the only thing truly feckless here is their imagination. I want to tell them that their indifference isn’t neutrality. It’s cowardice. I want to demand they locate their own humanity in the wreckage they refuse to name. That no amount of designer-scented detachment will save them from the imprecations of a future that will remember them as cowards.

Because love was here.

Is here.

Still.

And they refused it.

I am in the wreckage now. Holding the ineffable in my hands. The unkillable thing. And you, you, my unposted, unperforming witness stand beside me. And I whisper it like a child, lost in the department store of history:

How does it survive?

Love.

And you look at me, not with pity, not with resolution and say,

Because someone always chooses it.

And still, the humanoids laugh. But it’s brittle now. Their laughter sounds like glassware in a box marked fragile.

And the air changes.

And still, I am dumbfounded.

And I believe.

Then comes the ash.

It’s in my eyelashes. Under my fingernails. Inside the cuffs of my shirt. You try to wash it away and it reappears on the back of your neck, smug and spectral. The kind of dust that settles in the marrow, that doesn’t wash out in twelve showers or three baptisms.

A mother kneels. Her hands are wrapped around a backpack. Pink straps. Worn zippers. Apples and spelling tests and what’s left of childhood. Her mouth is open. No sound. This isn’t crying. This is older than crying. This is grief with its skin peeled back. The humanoids call it drama.

Behind her, someone in linen and white teeth holds up a phone and says, “If they didn’t want this, they should’ve evolved.” Their voice is bright. Unbothered. The voice belongs to someone who’s never known consequence, only cost-benefit analyses. The voice of someone who thinks consequence only applies to the unfashionable. Who still believes that the world is divided into smart and stupid. Worthy and disposable.

I want to write their name in smoke and salt and make them chew it until they choke on their own self-righteousness.

Instead, I press my palms to my eyes and breathe. The air smells like sulfur and erasure.

You pick something up from the dirt. A photograph. Folded. A boy in a red shirt, smiling like the future, was promised. You hold it like it matters. Not as memorabilia. As relic. Because maybe it is the last thread between us and a world where people remembered what it meant to be human.

Ans still, the humanoids laugh.

Not just laugh, they do that frat-boy chuckle, the one with no diaphragm behind it. The kind that says, “We win.” The kind that only comes from people who’ve never buried anyone.

They call it stupidity. They call it natural selection. They say, “They chose here.” They say, “They should have known.” As if safety was a subscription plan. As if systemic erasure was a feature of bad luck.

And I burn. I am incandescent with rage.

Because children are dead.

Not in metaphor. Not in story. In the toothbrush-left-on-the-sink sense. In the dinner plate no one will touch anymore sense. Dead in the way that never comes home for dinner again. Dead because a culture convinced itself that compassion was inefficient. That grief was indulgent. That difference was a liability. In the literal, irreversible, hole-in-the-universe sense.

And still, they justify it.

I don’t want to be polite. I want to scream with the mothers. I want to hurl their moral frameworks into the fire. I want to ask them how many bodies it takes to feel conviction. I want them to smell what shame smells like. I want them to feel the weight of their own sentience and buckle.

Mostly, though, I want to know how love survives.

You hand me the photo. I tuck it into my coat. It weighs more than grief.

Later, we sit on a curb that used to belong to a house. Or a bakery. Or a life. Two charred teacups sit beside us like ghosts.

And I begin to write.

Not to fix it. Not to forgive it. But because somewhere, someone needs to read that this happened. That they died. That they mattered. That someone knelt in the middle of the carnage and said their names like psalms. That someone watched love refuse extinction.

You nod.

And then, barely audible, you speak.

“Write it ugly if you must. But make them remember.”

So, I do.

Because here’s the part no one likes to say:

The real tragedy is not just in the lives lost.

It is in the people who saw those lives vanish and decided they deserved it.

It is in the laughter that follows funerals.

It is in the corporations that send condolences in Helvetica.

It is in the spectators who scroll past candlelight vigils because grief makes them late for brunch.

It is in the humanoid heart which now beats to the rhythm of algorithms and avoids anything that might require tenderness.

And still. The mother is kneeling.

She has not moved.

A little girl walks up. Places a flower beside her.

And I remember.

Not everything can be destroyed.

Not kindness.

Not memory.

Not love, when it chooses fire.

Not the kind of love that throws itself in front of a moving train and says, “Take me instead.”

The humanoids are leaving now.

They do not wave.

They do not see us.

And we, the haunted, the human, remain.

Postscript

This isn’t just about a single tragedy, or even the specific cruelty of humanoids sneering through their smug, curated oblivion while children’s names are still being whispered into rubble. It is about the pattern. The gorgeously grotesque, recursive, soul-obliterating pattern of what passes for human nature when comfort is currency and conscience is inconvenient.

The world is gasping for a kind of truth that does not metabolize death as data. I write them because some of us still feel in our skin what others dismiss with a shrug. Because somewhere, a mother is clutching a backpack and still calling her child's name into a silence that does not echo back.

And because somewhere else, someone is laughing. Someone is justifying. Someone is too tired or too important or too calibrated for empathy to bother looking.

What I’m saying, or failing to say, but circling like a dying moth is that people will always invent reasons to feel superior to grief they didn’t have to carry. People will always weaponize detachment as if it were wisdom. People will mock what they fear, then fear what they’ve mocked, then forget both. This is what they do instead of change.

And still, some of us can’t seem to stop noticing. Still, we scan the horizon of this decaying planetary theatre hoping someone else might say, “This hurts. This matters. This should never have been allowed.”

And sometimes they do.

Not often.

But sometimes.

And maybe that flicker that one incandescent moment of shared recognition is the only unburnt evidence that not all of us have rotted from the inside out.

We cannot afford to turn away anymore.

This was not just a tragedy.

It was a test.

And most of us failed.