the earth moved

Thursday night, lying in bed, i felt myself start to rock, as if i were on a ship, and not in an apartment building eleven stories above bangkok. Of course my first thoughts were of myself-- i had been feeling sick lately, was something wrong enough to make me so dizzy and off center?
Two hours later, reading the news, I saw the truth-- 6.8 earthquake in myanmar, spreading all the way to bangkok.
A couple weeks previously, a titan-like tsunami swept villages and their inhabitants into the seas along the coast of Japan,while nuclear reactors seep their contents into the air, all caused by an earthquake that had moved the foundations a few days earlier.

An apathetic, uncaring, unknowing force in the earths physical realm made a move, perhaps relatively small considering the size and age of the physical planet,and yet...the lives of so many have been forever changed, entire worlds destroyed, irreparable, unknowable, forgotten? if something passes away without record, without those who would remember and tell of it, did it really ever happen to begin with? and in that case, were these worlds destroyed, if no one knew that they had been?
did the earth just move, or did it become something else, something it had not been before, something to which the world before is irrelevant and alien?

364 days ago, the world moved, changed. A man took a life in violence, and the earth shifted. and now we have lived in world that doesn't know the woman it last for 364 days, and it wonders if she even existed-- was she more than her loss, did she exist in a different form once? did the world shift for everyone, or just those of us who felt it? if someone didn't feel it, did it happen? did it even matter that it happened?
will the fact that the earth has shaken and changed really be understood by someone who doesnt feel it, didnt know what it was before or realize there is an after?

"the misery of other people is only an abstraction, " Ray insisted, "something that can be sympathized with only by drawing from one's own experiences. But as it stands, true empathy remains impossible. And so long as it is, people will continue to suffer the pressure of their seemingly singular existence."
"and mistreat each other, won't they?"
Ray nodded. "Horrendously."