Anneke.Net > A Bit About Me > Prose of Days Past

Tonight I discovered the existence of World War II
from a picture.
No horrible descriptions,
no corpses,
no ovens.
Just a picture of a group of men, studying a map.
It was the simple, everyday things that caught me.
An old man in a bow tie, staring at the camera.
A balding man, his neighbor wearing a T-shirt and sunglasses,
holding a cigarette.
It was the sunglasses that got me.
A piece of life. Now, not past.
They made me realize this could have happened yesterday.
Or today.
Or tomorrow.
These were people. This was real.
The ordinary scares more than the extraordinary.
The media killed my horror.
The reality brought it back to life.
Oh, God.
Sunglasses.