A few nights ago, my home was broken into.
We were away at my aunt’s, and after a couple of false starts, had gone home rather late at night. When we entered, the first thing to clue us in was the open cutlery drawers. And then we stepped into the house properly and saw that it had been thoroughly ransacked.
My brother and I ran up the house, checking to see what they had taken. It was the usual – laptops, portable hard drives, petty cash. We’re not wealthy and we don’t have much of high value. What we do have are a lot of memories and keepsakes, and while they are still intact if bruised from all the tossing around that night, they feel tainted somehow.
I have a tendency to the hysterical (my mother will gladly demonstrate to you the way in which I thoroughly lost it once I saw the extent of the damage), my brother has a tendency for dramatic violence (he slammed half his body into a wall in anger at the reluctance of the police on the scene to actually enter our house) and my father has a tendency to flare up with anger (evidently a genetic trait). My mother was the only truly calm one that night. Our cousins, whose house had just been broken into a few days prior, came to wait with us. The Niece was cheerful and blissfully oblivious, and she recognised the forensics officer as the same one who had examined her own home. She followed him from room to room as he took pictures and dusted for fingerprints, and when she came to my room, she insisted that the mess was my doing.
“Who did this? Bad people did this,” my brother said in his usual patient way with her.
“Tak! She did it!” She was adamant. Also, she’d visited my room in various states of mess before, and this was not beyond her imagination.
And although the forensics guy was pleasant and helpful, the police were either highly incompetent or very jaded. We were, after all, the fourth house in our row of houses to have been hit by the same burglars. We were already on high alert; somehow, we still didn’t see this coming.
I’ve lost all the pictures from my years abroad. I’ve lost all the work I’ve stored in various places for the last eight years. If anything, I’ve learned my lesson: always save things in an online account.
I don’t know where to begin. I don’t know how to salvage all my words from all those years. They’re hardly of good quality, so I know that if I’ve sent any to friends, odds are they’ve been deleted, or are lying in the hidden depths of somebody’s inbox. I don’t know how to replace the pieces I know I must write again, because they were so poorly done the first time around.
What I’ve also lost is my sense of security in my own home. We jump at the slightest noise; we double, triple-check all the locks on all the doors. We pray for protection, we pray for safety. My mother prays constantly that above all, we have peace of mind. I sleep with a hockey stick now, which doesn’t bode well for whoever tries to wake me up on the weekends. My neighbour offered to lend us his machete for a few nights. “Chop of the bugger’s hand,” he said.
We do what we can because the police just aren’t doing enough.
We do what we can because it’s tough times and this is what a lot of people are doing in order to survive. Perhaps this is easier. Perhaps they don’t know better.
I pray they die ugly deaths and rot in hell, all the same. I pray that I get the chance to bash in their faces and spit in their eyes. Sometimes I’m not sure what I want from them. Sometimes I think perhaps I should forgive, but my heart doesn’t seem big enough to do that yet. And I think that scares me most of all.
I want them to be caught and punished. I want them to know how it feels to not feel safe anywhere anymore. Likely they already live in constant fear and always on the run, so I want them to suffer worse. I also want the people who spout statistics and numbers in my face and tell me that my country is a safer place to just shut the hell up because they obviously don’t know what it feels like to have your safety violated. All it takes is one time.
I’m also grateful that we weren’t physically harmed. I’m grateful because things could have easily been worse. I live in a house locked in by grilles, reinforced with sharp metal spikes and padlocked in every possible corner. I should feel safer but I don’t. I am angry but I am grateful but I’m also vengeful yet very aware of how easy we had it, comparatively.
I’m also grateful because at times like these, you get to learn who really cares. My brother texted his friends immediately and they rang him back, saying simply, “We’re headed there now.” They arrived just as our cousins and uncle left, one of them dressed in a Jedi outfit because they’d just finished watching The Phantom Menace when they got the message. They quoted ObiWan at my brother, who laughed with relief, even though the scifi reference flew over his head. They stood there, being guys, all gangly and quietly supportive. They gave my brother those visually awkward manhugs, the one where they half-hug, half-shake hands.
My own friends have checked in and called and texted, and I’m thankful for all of them. Thank you, all of you.
And I know I’m expected to end this with a short, sweet sentence that is reflective in nature and acts as a summary of my thoughts, but screw that. Here’s how it’ll go:
There’s sunshine from behind the clouds and stuff, but I’m not gonna lie – I’m pretty bloodthirsty at the moment.
