mortality...

This weekend a chunk of ice fell away from the part of me that feels itself invincible; melted by the bright sunlight of comparison; Katherine Horton. I feel strange to write that name, to even contemplate her life and her death, my link to her distant and removed. I feel almost ashamed and unjustified to feel a connection to her, to claim to be affected by a death that has so devastated her family and her close friends. What right do I have to even write about her? to claim to have been affected by her death?

But I was.

On New Year’s Eve she walked out of a beach hut in Thailand to return a phone call to her mother. Two men raped and murdered her, while her mother listened to her muffled cries back here in Cardiff on the end of the telephone line. Her body was found by fisherman in the sea of a picture postcard Thai beach.

She and I learnt to swim together, our parents sharing lifts to the nearby pool. Our generation of North Cardiff twenty somethings all attended that tidy, but grubby primary school, Cefn Onn and all moved from there up to Llanishen High, a series of concrete blocks and muddy grass.
A few years ago we left to embrace the world; we were not the same, we had diverse expectations, different life experiences, not everyone was as naiive as I was, but somehow we were together. And our understanding of ourselves was subconsciously always linked back to our community, to our generation, to comparisons. The world in its magnificent and violent way has not embraced us as I tacitly assumed it would. It’s been cruel and as we have pushed our way down our paths to adulthood the world has hurt and damaged some of us in the most horrendous and inconceivable ways. It has betrayed us. And now as our little communtiy in Cardiff stands in shock, mourning the loss of potential, the end of the dreams of a young woman, of the young woman herself I imagine myself in comparison to her, I imagine how that could have been me so easily. I imagine how it could have been any one of us. And how equally unfair it would have been.

Like snow melting within me, I am left to see myself as fragile as only flesh and blood can be. An icicle that believes itself to be invincible and yet slowly is melting into a puddle of cold, clouded water. And it seems egotistical and self obsessed to even reflect on the catalyst that provoked my sense of mortality, but I somehow can’t stop myself. And I cannot even begin to imagine the pain her parents, family and friends feel. I cannot bring myself to think what it must be like for them. And I wonder if I can believe any longer that there is a destiny, a path for each person -- because how could such a violent and horrible end be anyone’s destiny? anyone’s path? And why did the world betray her, when she reached out to embrace it?