After Tuol Sleng Museum (prison for victims of the Khmer Rouge)

June 23, 2009

This is too much. Just too much. How do we even deserve existence? How could a God allow us? How could an all-knowing God have given us life knowing what we'd do with it?

Seeing the documentary about what happened, the tears of old women crying about the loss of sons and daughters, the videos of children toiling day after day, hour after hour in the fields - as young as 5 or 6. Seeing a former guard describe the things he'd done with a smile on his face. I can only hope the smile was to mask other emotions. And now I'm less than half way through the musem. Less than halfway through the testimonies of torture and loss. Paintings displaying horrible tortures, a creative display shooting reflections of the photos hauntingly displays them as ghosts, retelling the Cambodian belief that if a person dies without a proper funeral (being cremated and prayed over by monks for their soul's safe passage) they will be forced to linger. Unsettled spirits . . . but the thing that's most chilling is the eyes in the stark photos of prisoners - documented with numbers on their chests.

Each eye holds so much life, sorrow, history. . . . sometimes I think it'd be better to not believe in a soul.