Dear Child, I am the nothingness that will kill you. You do not know it, but you will feel the heaviness of your fate seep into your bones and flesh.

It will not be fast, but slow, the days will rise and fall for awhile. I will sleep with you. I will lie awake with you when you are too exhausted to raise your limbs. I will cover your sunken eyes with a mist that blurs the outlines of the world. You cannot see me, you cannot see your mother, your father, your brothers or sisters.

Your body will become your enemy. It wants to live, but to live without food it must feed off itself. No one or no thing is giving that which will give you energy, so you will look internally, everywhere, for the stores of energy, fat and then protein, that will keep your eyes open. And there are stores of energy in your tissues and in your organs. Your body will consume them, not knowing that this is the fatal law of diminishing returns.

You may as well eat the air, which is what you doing, for there is nothing else. I could say I am the air, but I am crueller than a hurricane. My nothingness was created. You are a child. You should not have enemies, but this is life and death on Earth, and your body is now your destroyer. To survive it scavenges among your flesh for whatever reserves you have for the nutrients it needs to keep your organs functioning. And when they are depleted, they will shrink until they stop. Your muscles will waste away. Bones will stretch tight against your limp thin pale skin, you will breathe for awhile longer. And. Then. Your. Heart. Will. Stop.

I will become you, that is, you will be nothing. You will not be alone. Through no fault of your own, after all you are just a child, you will slip from your mother’s arms. I know it is no consolation to know in your final days that I have existed for ages. You were not the first. You will not be the last. Should I introduce myself? I am starvation. I am the weapon without bullet nor missile, nor even rough hand upon your chest.

I exist wherever wars are fought. Again it is no consolation that you are, in some circumstances, what’s called collateral damage. At other times, you are also the target as much as a soldier. The world calls it a blockade to subdue an enemy into submission. If people starve, then so much quicker the surrender. These names will mean nothing to you for you are a child, and should be outside running around and playing with your friends, but you now will join the countless dead of famine and starvation – Biafra, Ireland, the Soviet Union under Stalin, Sudan, for example.

And now Gaza.

It is the worst fate of a mother that having given life to a child, they then cannot feed that child, to protect it from the ravages of a thing beyond their control. More than half a century ago US President Dwight D. Eisenhower said, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”

In Gaza, the consequence of this is not hidden. It is not invisible to the world. In recent weeks, almost 1000 people had died while trying to get food. In one month — May — more than 5000 children under the age of five were treated for acute malnutrition. To a child, the cause of war is beyond their ken. To a child, they only feel that nothingness that will consume them. And then they, too, will become nothingness.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.