Peace

An olive branch. 

They are barrels. Perhaps not quite the kind used to store olive oil but they are filled with oil, a much cruder form. They are also filled with shrapnel, iron filings and TNT. Dropped from air planes flying overhead deep into the heart of the city. The consequences are, as you can imagine, devastating.  Just yesterday, a similar barrel bomb as they are now called, was dropped on a kindergarten in Aleppo. The bomb destroyed the kindergarten and leveled a nearby residential block. There were casualties; A fact which has become the only certainty in the Syrian conflict.  I can't help but feel a surge of sorrow for this place that I have visited. For I have breathed its air and ate its food. But then again so have millions of other foreigners. And maybe that will be my undoing, this sentimentality of mine. Maybe I should learn to be like the rest of the world, to forget and to focus on more pressing things in life, like getting ahead for starters. Perhaps. 

Someone I was once close to, what do we call them? An ex? Ex friend, ex boss, ex lover, ex colleague? Once told me that my speech was peppered with "Perhaps-es". The Ex was and is probably right. I suppose I use the tentative too often because I find the affirmative and the reality of it all too difficult to bear; always hopeful of a better tomorrow. That and this sentimentality of mine will be my undoing. Perhaps.