A Box
By Gabriella Panagiotakis
A box.
Feet planted on something too small to trust.
What is under you? Wood? Air? Nothing that would save you if you fall.
Don’t move. Stillness is crucial here. Maybe you deserved this but I can feel that you don’t. I don’t know, but I know that you don’t. Because nobody deserves this. Who are you? How did you get here? What chain of names, of doors, of decisions placed you here? People. Are they evil? Are we evil? The new world as an entity did go too far and finally got caught this time. This is just the tip of the iceberg though because there is so much more under here. These are simply the only images we received.
Is God in this room with you, or did He leave when the door closed? The body learns balance quickly. The mind does not. I’m sure your feet hurt. Maybe splinters pierce your toes and tickle at the arch of your foot. Does that sensation take you back home?
She beams. Not a small smile. Not hesitation or confusion. A wide, practiced smile that holds its shape, teeth bright under the hard glare of the camera’s flash. They all smile. In fact, it is beautiful. Such a beautiful smile, such an ugly person. Laughter drifts where protest should live, loose and unafraid – the thin, breathy kind that slips out between words and the clicks of a shutter. The laughter unsettles more than shouting would. It suggests permission. Comfort. Belonging. As if this moment fits neatly into a day already planned. As if nothing sacred has been violated. It almost looks like a joke. Almost looks staged. Let’s pretend it’s a prank. Let’s pretend the thing beside her is a Halloween decoration, carefully posed, unreal. Let’s pretend makeup and costumes explain it all. But they don’t. It isn’t a joke. It never was. Her smile stays warm while everything else freezes. The fingers are white. Cold white fingers. I didn’t touch them, but I know their temperature. Cold lives here, in concrete, in wire, in rooms without windows. Her wide smile remains. It is colder now.
I don’t remember the words “Abu Ghraib.”
“Abu Ghraib,” my professor said.
I don’t even know how to shape them in my mouth.
I remember the photos instead, the images that bypass language entirely.
The hood.
Arms outstretched like Jesus, not in salvation but in surrender. She explains the event to us, but I can’t take my eyes off the screen. 2004. Torture camp. Iraqi citizens. Tortured by Americans. The photos got leaked to the world by CBS. The world demanded a stop, and a stop came. But why
did it take that measure to stop violence? We knew it was happening, right? We knew we were hurting people. The difference here is that we saw it. Our eyes are the window to the soul, and our souls were hit hard that day. Every heart in the room hits the floor. I can’t see everyone around me, but I know everyone feels the same way. I know we are united in this moment with grief, disturbance, and perhaps shame. My feet began shuffling and I crossed my legs. I tried to make myself seem smaller, so nobody could see me. My eyes well. And then shame follows quickly behind the tears. Who am I to cry? It was our doing anyway. I wasn’t supposed to see these photos. Nobody was. But seeing changes the body, even when nothing else does.
This event was already processed.
That’s what history says. Millions saw it. Millions cried. Millions mourned. Millions moved on. But I did not move on. It has been days for me, but years for the world. How did the Devil reach us? I thought we were the good guys, the ones with white hats. Clean. Simple. Fake.
What is playing in his mind right now? I imagine a dusty backyard. Children running barefoot. Heat clinging to skin. Dirty, but paradise because it is theirs.
The sun stays all day until dinner. His wife cooks the best food in the neighborhood, and he brags about it. This is refusal – refusal to let the box erase the life that existed before it. I hope this is where you found yourself in that moment behind the black hood.
The person under there. Who is it?
A father? A mother? Someone’s child? Well, yes. Someone’s child. That much is unavoidable. What did they do? What was their job? Maybe a banker. Maybe a manager. Maybe nothing that would matter now. The mind reaches for labels because labels feel safer than faces. I could try to find out. But what would that change? Nothing. You’re still gone, and even if you’re not gone, you’re gone. Gone in the ways that matter, your insides scraped away. Your brain is fried, stuck in the only moment you can remember. I hope you can find those memories again and find yourself again.
I can’t resolve this.
This event is out of my reach. Unfixable. I can’t undo it. We circle Abu Ghraib the way sharks circle prey – convinced movement equals understanding. We sit with the questions until they grow familiar and heavy. The photograph does not offer closure. It only keeps the same questions and terrors circling our minds.
There is no moral exit ramp. No final sentence that lets us leave clean. The longer we look, the more we realize the image is not asking to be solved but to be seen. The horror does not dull but instead it settles in. It becomes a recurring thought, something I carry everyday. I’ve learned the shape and weight of this event because I need to. The questions stay because answers would be too kind in a world that is not.
This event resists resolution because that would make it small again. Contain it. But it does not. Abu Ghraib leaks into the world and into memory. The photograph holds him still, but it does not hold the damage. That keeps moving and circling like this world we live in. The media moves on so we move on. Well, not all of us.
The man stands on the box in solitude.
That is what breaks us – not only the hood, not only the wires, but the aloneness. The absence of witnesses inside the frame. Suffering becomes unbearable when it looks singular. He becomes a ghost, and we cry because ghosts ask something of us we cannot give back. Company. He had company. Company he wished he never asked for. And still, here we are. Outside looking in from a distance we can never overcome.
In the end, there is still a box.
Still feet balancing. Still the command: don’t move. What is under you now? Not wood. Not air but History and Silence. The weight of having seen these images lingers within every single one of us. The weight of your tired body lingers within you. The body still knows how to balance. The mind still asks its questions. Is God in this room with you? Is there anyone? We tell ourselves that we are only witnesses. Only viewers. We equate distance with innocence. But the image entered us the moment we laid eyes on it. It lives in our brains now. We carry it into classrooms, into conversations, into quiet nights when the room is too still. To see and then continue as usual is its own kind of participation. We didn’t build the box, of course, but we live in a world that allows it. We look at it. We study it. We write about it. And in doing so, we accept it into our history, which means it belongs, in some way, to us. The box does not disappear, we just learn how to stand around it.
