Sarah's Corner
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Violence

<Death of a Stranger>

I know I will find you
Among the complete darkness
Among the deepest pain and sorrow

A taste of Death comes
Yet at the very end
A Spirit of Hope rebounds
And I will see your face again, illuminated

Then it comes the realization
That you are my only companion

~Sarah Cheung


This poem was written in memory of a teen who was killed in gang fight. He was running to me with his hand covering his stomach. I was only eleven at the time, walking with my 3-year-old brother to the grocery store. I remember the stranger's eyes were stretching like they were going to fall off. His face was totally purple. His breath was very heavy, and he was looking at me with the face of Death. What I remember then is clenching my hands over my brother's eyes until he started screaming that I was hurting him.

Later on, I heard that someone had cut a big hole in this teen's stomach and his guts were falling out. I and my brother were the LAST people he saw. I took my little brother and ran off from the scene immediately when the guy fell. The thought of being a witness for the police was simply too terrifying. I really didn't remember the details of the scene, and there was no way for me to tell the truth. I think it is my survival mechanism that shut down my senses when it happened. The strange thing is, and to this day I still can't figure this out, I remember the sky had turn completely purple before I heard the boy running. I have never seen a sky like that before or since.

I don't remember how I felt when it happened. But I clearly recall how it felt afterwards. I become very withdrawn for a few days. I didn't realize that I was acting strange. My family thought that I was ill. Yet at night, I heard that breathing again, and it was loud. I felt like I was going deaf. For one moment, I would be in extreme horror, and call out to God. Yet most of the time I found myself extremely angry; I would imagine what those gang people looked like, and I would imagine myself cutting their guts out and smashing them into pieces. The imagery was so violent that my body temperature would rise till I could hardly bear the weight of my blankets.

But in the end, tears would fall down my face and I would feel so alone. I would cry and cry until I was totally exhausted and my eyes ached.

One of the most difficult realizations from this experience is how deeply we betray ourselves. We think we can only feel our own selves. But the truth is we are feeling each other every single second. This "Oneness" is probably the most terrifying yet the most powerful learning I gained from my horrible experience. So when we hurt each other, we are simply hurting ourselves, and killing is ultimately self-destruction.

To survive as a human being is possible only through love. Only love is eternal.

In the years which followed, I could hardly ever bring myself to think about the teenage stranger, but when I do now, I whisper something into his ear: that he has been loved by a total stranger, ME... under the purple sky.


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