it's not okay.

Sneakers, bare legs, shorts, a boy, only a boy... blood.  Lying in the road.  My road.  My street.  Half a block from my house.  I didn't see him above the waist until they put him in the ambulance.  Pronounced dead on arrival to the hospital.  Fatal stabbing.  In the back.  Blood everywhere.

I left around 4:55pm, to take my sister to the airport, and arrived home about 5:13pm, and there he was, lying in the street.  I had to swerve the car to miss his legs.  I walked down the street to see what was wrong, through a trail of blood - his blood - that lead up the street toward our house.  The police and ambulance arrived shortly thereafter and the whole street was slathered with police, police tape, and homicide detectives.  "Don't step in the blood."

The girl who said she found him, whose mother called the police, was playing tag with her little brother, maybe 2 or 3, when she saw him.  She couldn't have been more than 10.

His name was Irvin - his last name means, "of peace."  He was 15 years old.  They don't know what happened, or who, or why.  I recognize him from the neighborhood, even though I did not know him personally.  I wonder if I would recognize his mother.  I grieve as a mother, knowing only a small piece of what I can only presume is her grief.  He was only 15.

"They dress the wound of my people as though it were not serious. ‘Peace, peace,’ they say, when there is no peace."*

I don't know how to process this.  I don't know where to begin.  I feel numb.  Compartmentalized so that I can continue to manage my household, my family.  Not unsafe. But changed. I walk the same street today as I did yesterday, tomorrow, and the day before, although I have yet to walk past that spot again.  I did not lose a person that I knew, and I am not fearful for my own or my family's safety, and so my grief does not have the usual outlets to express itself.  But I am grieving nonetheless.  I feel loss nonetheless.

Peace, peace, they say, but there is no peace.  The newspapers have moved on; the heralds of modern decree, our "prophets" of today have declared, "all is well once more."  The police tape is gone.  But there's a 15 year old boy, named "of peace," who is no longer here.  A gap in a family, a community, a neighborhood.  I don't care what the reason was.  I don't care what he had done, who he had pissed off, who had a grudge against him.  I don't care if he was a saint or a sinner, whether he was in with the wrong crowd, or was a straight A student (or both), whether he was beloved by his friend (he was), or hated by all.

He was 15.  And it's never okay.

It's never okay.

*Jeremiah 6:14