should seem basic

When I look at my fingers striking different arrangements of keys in just seconds it amazes me. It's largely controlled by neural input and output, but still now and then it just catches me. I operate these hands.

When I was a kid I had a hard time understanding that I was alive, as funny as that sounds. I realized yes I was alive and had a living body like everyone else but it didn't feel that way. I was reminded of it when I felt pain but aside from that it didn't feel as if I were in a body. I felt like a spectator watching everything pass before me. Even now thoughts like that appear where I have to step back and remind myself. I think of it differently now after a recent scare of my own which I can't confirm or deny. A body feels basic, but so complex when it turns against you.

On the news they showed A.J. Walker, a person who was injured in the trolley square shootings. He had a tutor sitting with him at a table. They would flip over little cards with pictures on them, a panda, a rock, a train. After every time he pointed a finger at a card a silence would follow. Sometimes it would catch up with him and he could name that panda or that train. Other times it would take longer.

Even though in most aspects he was fine, I felt a sense of injustice seeing a grown person reduced to that. "How about this picture?" There are somethings that I need to see as given to someone, but even the most subtle but needed things can be stripped away. No one should ever have to face that. It still happened, and life seems all the more fragile.

When I delve into it there is so much more that that which gets to me. I understand I am still young and only know but a fraction of the world. I've sought comfort recently focusing on the fact that I'm not the only one having to fight a battle. I knew that there was so much worse out there.

I watched on the tv these brown starving eyes watch her mother wilt to her end from aids, shut away in the corner of some dilapidated shanty be unprepared to be an orphan. On another programming I saw a handful of children born with a disease which ages their little bodies beyond reason, four year olds plagued by arthritis, heart complications, strokes, and all ailments you only see at a very old age. With a more recent, local happening, that poor husband who watched as his house exploded with his wife and new baby. When I was younger I would notice but it seemed like it was happening in another universe, now I am able to understand the grave reality of it.

I think back on darker times in history, the holocaust, Mao's reign in China, the black death and so on. I know human suffering is not new. It breaks my heart to know of these things especially knowing that in all of these situations someone was there still pleaing for change with their nerves cut off. No matter how charged their will they couldn't save anyone. I've had a very different outlook lately.
In the end I am able to impart from these things but it is difficult to know that it is indeed there, while the rest of us go on like normal.