The Same Hand

Glitch Cinema Presents,

The Same Hand.

You are dreaming of a wall.

On one side, a child eats an orange. On the other side, a child watches.

The juice runs down the first child’s chin. The second child swallows nothing.

You wake up. You are both children.

There was a man who built bombs in a factory. He had a daughter who loved horses. He worked overtime so she could take riding lessons on Saturdays.

Somewhere else, a horse lay dead in a field. A girl the same age as his daughter stood over it, not crying anymore. She had used up all her crying last month when they buried her brother under the same sky that covers your house, your office, your carefully made bed.

The man in the factory didn’t know her.

But his hands knew her hands.

You think you are watching the news.

The news is watching you.

It sees your coffee. Your clean floor. Your irritation at the traffic, the weather, the slow Wi-Fi.

It sees that you have never had to run.

Here is a secret nobody tells you:

The wall you believe in — the one between here and there, between us and them, between the good people and the bad people —

That wall is made of your own skin.

You built it with your own bones.

And on the other side of it?

Your own face. Looking back.

A woman sells her body in a room with no windows.

Somewhere else, a man buys a shirt for very little money. What a bargain, he thinks. He doesn’t think about the fingers that stitched it. He doesn’t think about what those fingers had to do before they learned to sew.

This is not a metaphor.

This is the thread that connects your collar to her throat.

When you point at the enemy, look at your hand.

Three fingers pointing back.

Now look closer.

Those three fingers are also the enemy — also the refugee, also the soldier, also the one who gave the order, also the one who had no choice.

Your hand is not your hand.

Your hand is a meeting place.

Why do we give different names to different things?

Because we are afraid.

If everything has the same name — if the torturer and the tortured are written in the same ink — then what do we do with our clean hands?

We would have to admit:

There are no clean hands.

There is only the hand.

And it holds everything.

You want to help.

Good.

But first, sit with this:

The burning house is your house. The drowning child is your child. The one holding the match is also you. The one who looked away is also you.

This is not guilt. This is geography.

You are not separate from the wound. You ARE the wound. And also the healing. And also the knife. And also the hand that could have stopped it.

This is, because that is.

Your breakfast exists because someone didn’t eat. Your safety exists because someone wasn’t saved. Your peace exists because someone is still at war.

This is not punishment. This is physics. This is the way things lean on each other in the dark.

There is a child somewhere, right now, who will not sleep tonight.

There is a mother somewhere, right now, who has forgotten her own name because grief has eaten it.

There is a man somewhere, right now, pulling a trigger because he was taught that the body in front of him is not a body like his.

And there is you.

Reading this.

In a room with walls.

Believing you are only in this room.

The glitch is this:

You think the screen shows you the world.

But the screen is a mirror.

You think the horror is out there.

But your eyes are made of the same water as their tears.

You want to change the world?

First, stop pretending you are not the world.

The border between nations is drawn on your heart. The war between peoples is fought in your mind. The child who is starving is starving inside your own hunger — the hunger you feel for something you cannot name, something money cannot buy, something no wall can protect.

You have been looking for yourself in all the wrong places.

You are in the rubble. You are in the rescue. You are in the hand that holds the bread. You are in the hand that holds the gun.

What should I do?

See.

That’s all.

Just see.

See that there is no ordinary moment. See that your breath is borrowed. See that the stranger is not strange. See that enemy is just a word we invented because brother was too heavy to carry.

One day you will die.

And in that moment, if you are lucky, you will feel it — the wall coming down, the names dissolving, the terrible beautiful truth:

You were never alone.

You were never separate.

You were always everyone.

The child with the orange. The child without.

The same mouth.

The same hunger.

The same hand, reaching.

And then —

The membrane thins.

You feel it. The pulse beneath all pulses. The hum that was always there, under the noise, under the names, under the forgetting.

You are not IN the universe.

You ARE the universe —

Looking at itself. Weeping for itself. Healing itself.

Every atom in your body was forged in a dying star.

The same star that made the refugee. The same star that made the soldier. The same star that made the child laughing in a field ten thousand miles from here.

You are all made of the same ancient fire.

And fire does not fight itself.

Fire only burns — and becomes light.

One day the earth will exhale —

And all the walls will look like what they always were:

Lines drawn in water.

And we will laugh.

Not because the suffering wasn’t real.

But because we finally remembered —

We were the ocean the whole time.

Welcome home.

You never left.

END TRANSMISSION