That week I wrote a new vocabulary into my notebook

Not hard words just words I finally heard the real meaning of

Soldiers become units one unit two units

Civilians become cases line items on a receipt

Homes become households a hundred thousand of them moving before noon

The displaced become running totals updated nightly like a stock price

I went through every statement looking for one word

The one word that should sit next to all those numbers

Couldn't find it No form has a field for it

The word is name

Two hundred thousand people in July is two hundred thousand names

Half a million in the months that followed half a million names

Any mother can call those names one by one no mother ever needed a ledger

But the paperwork of an entire country calls them a total

Counting isn't a crime systems have to count I understand

But that night I wrote one line down beware the day we can count without picturing a single face

A bullet gets fired at least the casing stays

A shoe wears through it still has its pair

But one person in a running total once the line's crossed out

And the total just gets smaller

We were counted never named

Totaled up never remembered

A figure in the morning report

A percentage in the projections

They count us when they count the cost

They count us when they write the report

But the one field no form has ever had

Is the one that asks who we are

I used to think I was the one holding the pen the counter not the counted

Then one night I read the evacuation zone notice

They measure it as a radius from the line of contact so many kilometers so many districts

I traced my finger across the map and my finger stopped on its own

I could pronounce every one of those names I grew up out there

My home province sits against this border Long before Bangkok moved me away

I've heard those district names all my life some of them from before I knew the world had a word for border

And if that compass circle widens by a few more centimeters on the map

It drags across my entire childhood

That night I understood the word we for the first time

It was never a word for victims somewhere far away distance just made me look like an outsider

Everyone on both sides of that line is already a name in somebody's ledger the circle just hasn't reached them yet

I opened the news to the shelters a hundred and thirty one sites

Mats counted Mosquito nets counted Meals counted by the box

Everything in there has a number attached

Except the one thing every person carried in their own story

We were counted never named

Totaled up never remembered

A figure in the morning report

A percentage in the projections

They count us when they count the cost

They count us when they write the report

But the one field no form has ever had

Is the one that asks who we are

I went back to my own notebook and did one small thing

Drew a new table same as every government form

A date column A place column A number column all there

Then I added one field no form has a name column

It's still almost empty I don't know their names

I only know the few that surfaced in the news and I wrote down every one I found

The blanks that remain I don't fill in I leave them empty on purpose

Because an honest blank testifies louder than a page of invented names

The day the world wants to know what this war actually took

Don't read the number column read the empty one

We were counted never named both sides of the line same form same layout

Different words for the units but the missing field missing in exactly the same place

And as long as that field doesn't exist the word disposable stays true Every single day