My true crime obsession

I have accumulated grisly crimes over the years not unlike the way I have accumulated my own instances of shame. Like those instances, I play these crimes over and over in my head sometimes: one leads to another, without fail. They are crimes against women, I think without exception. They haunt me. Yet I continue to click on them. Sometimes I go searching for them, reading old articles, or blog posts written by bots designed to look like they've been recently updated.

I will not share the details of these crimes, to you my imaginary audience or to my future self who may read through this. I can only hope that I will live long enough to forget them. 

For a long time I was troubled by the death of children. It feels like I grew sated or bored with that question, with the inadequacy of all possible answers, and switched to this one: the way hands and weapons are put onto women until they cease to live, and the thoughts that go through their minds before the light goes out. One of these crimes, I'm now remembering, came from a television show. I only watched one episode; I was so shocked by what they showed at the end.

The term theodicy has popped up over the years as I've sparred with or been tormented by all this (is it me or is it it that does this to me?). There is surely a good joke somewhere about theodicy and the Iliad. 

I know someone who knew one of these women. That's another thing I think of. She--the one I know--was sitting on a couch, shaking her head, could not explain it.

One of these crimes was committed without malice, actually, by an automobile, and the blunt idiocy of the universe. I count it in the same category. I even wrote down, on a scrap of paper somewhere, a few of the details of this case, to try and prevent myself from morbidly hunting them down again next year, and the year after, when the mood hits. I don't know where the scrap of paper is, but I saw it recently, and believe I kept it.