I took no pictures. Denis took that one picture. He didn’t ask he just knew I’d want it. We walked around the museum alone and silent. At least a hundred people were in that dark room and there was only the sound of shuffling and sniffling. Alone together.

I think the reason I came here was to witness the pain. It hurts to witness pain. It’s the small human details that hurt the most. Our pain will pass, we’ll forget what we saw here, what we read, what we heard on the audio guide before we turned it off because we couldn’t hear any more. I can’t tell you the stories only snippets remain in my memory and even they are too much.

You see we could imagine ourselves, the parents running to the school to find our children. And we could imagine ourselves, the children sitting day after day in the place where the bomb went off waiting for our parents, who never come to find us.

At the start of the stories there’s a photograph taken soon after the blast, of a young girl with cuts and bandages and then at the exit just as you’re gathering yourself to leave there’s a second photo a few years later, all healed. She looks happy, she had made it. A happy ending.

But she hadn’t made it, she had died a few years later of what they were calling the a-bomb-disease, one of the cancers. I was cheated out of my happy ending. There is no happy ending. While we continue to believe there are others who are less human than we are, we will continue to inflect damage on them and their children. Until we are all human there is no ending. There is no happy.