Notice now, that they come when the bodies are still warm, but the cameras have steadied. They come with open embraces and eyes wide as if astonishment were absolution. They'll slide into your DMs We didn't know! and they'll demand, Now that we do, teach us! But the fire had already eaten through bone. The children had already been named in ash. The women had already braided grief into silence. And the men had long since grown tired of explaining the difference between murder and a holocaust. These late arrivals. How they hide in kindness, laced in guilt. They carry not water, but mirrors. They do not come to extinguish the blaze, but to reflect upon themselves by its glow. They do not see the altar. Only their own silhouette, flickering. They've warned us, those who have left. The warnings. Not of comfort, but of collapse. There will come a time, they said. When those who caused the drought will arrive with empty buckets, asking for the location of the well that they buried. In Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, they call this forgiveness. But in the days of old, it was called theft. The lie is not that they did not know. The lie is that knowing would have made them different. The serpent did not lie about knowledge. It lied about the consequences. We have learned that the hardest part is not the violence. It is the aftermath. It is the hands that arrive too late, asking for intimacy without responsibility, for forgiveness without transformation, for lessons without cost. These hands do not dig graves. They design infographics and workshops. So we ask today, to be delivered from temptation. Temptation to translate again. To render our dead legible. To make our scars instructive. But the dead murmurs. No more parables for Pharoh. No more lullabies for Rome. There is a time for mourning. There is a time for teaching. And there is a time for turning your face away. So we return to the mountain. Not to descend with commandments, but to remember what cannot be carved in stone. We speak now not for conversion, but for precision. For clarity. Not for persuasion, but for the preservation of the sacred. Let the latecomers come. Let them weep. Let them slide. But do not let the profane touch the holy.
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