At the house across the street, a group of teenaged boys and girls sit around on a sunny Sunday evening. The boys talk loud, the girls giggle in packs. They sit on banisters, in rocking chairs, on the stairs. A few of them have managed to climb their way onto the roof of the porch. They insult each other as only friends can, and unknowingly celebrate being young.

Several thousands of miles away, in Israel, a 13-year old blogger known as Noamik writes, “During the funeral I thought about what I would write here. I wanted to record every detail, but now I don’t even know what to write.”

A few hundred miles away from Noamik, a a 24-year-old woman, Maya Hage, sits on a porch wearing her “dark Chanel glasses, a revealing white T-shirt and tight sweat pants.” She says, “The Lebanese enjoy life, they enjoy leading a good life and having fun. We had other battles to fight — like finding work and making this economy grow. Waging a war on Israel was not a priority for us.”

Down the street from here, three young women hang watercolors on a gallery wall, drink Mountain Dew, and salivate for the Taco Bell run that will be their end-of-work reward.

A few hundred miles from here, a 2-year-old girl plays in a lake, learning how exciting it can be to her head under water. Her grandfather watches proudly on, and her mother is nervous that she’ll take a breath at the wrong time.

In Flushing, New York, the parents of Julia A. Ramon, begin the rest of their life without their child, the 2,552 American to be killed in Iraq, a 22-year-old corporal in the 2nd Marines Division.

It is such a beautiful and terrible day.