My mother got re-married in Las Vegas.
My brother and I were still going through puberty. Things were confusing. They still are.
She was re-married in the gorgeous hallways of the Venetian hotel, where the ceiling was painted and illuminated to make it look like a crystal-clear-blue-sky.
We mostly swam in the lazy river at the Monte Carlo Hotel, ecstatic that we didn't have to use inflatable tubes for once. We swam against the stream, with the stream, we surfed using each other's bodies as boards, we only came out for McDonalds milkshakes & fries.
We saw all kinds of things on the strip that we didn't understand.
"Smell that?" my mom said. "That's what marijuana smells like."
That smell started showing up everywhere in my life. It smelled like that at the Fleetwood Mac concert on April 18th, 2013. We had just gotten out of TD Bank Stadium, and eager to get home, Rhianna and I started following the throng of people out of the stadium and into the heart of the city.
It wasn't until we got home that we realized an MIT police officer had been shot and killed.
Three days earlier, the Boston Bombing had occurred.
I have two distinct and contradictory memories of this event.
The first aligns closer to reality. I woke up nonplussed, but quickly became concerned when realizing how many text messages I had. It seems there had been a terrorist attack recently, just now, in our fucking city, right down the street from where I lived.
The second memory, and the one I frequently call into suspect, was of waking up to an explosion. Or, waking up after an explosion. Part of my memory wants desperately to recall an explosion. To be relevant. To be important. To make me feel like I was there. But the more I think of it, the more it seems fabricated. Implanted by my ego. A trick of the mind designed to pull me closer to the tragedy than I actually was.
Because the truth was and still is, I had nothing to do with it. I wasn't there, it didn't impact me. Merely existing in the city was not enough to make me feel affected. My mind was scrambling to place me in the midst of a tragedy I would rather soon forget.
I slept in most of the day because I was up too late getting high and playing video games. Just last night I was up all night doing the same. It's remarkable how nothing changes. I imagine myself... in so many different shades and perspectives. I imagine myself a hero. A dependable friend, lover, ally. Yet where was I? Recovering from my appetite for excess. What was I doing last night, as hundreds were being gunned down at a concert? Delving farther and farther into my own selfish tendencies.
Nothing changes around me. And to quote a witness from last night's shooting, "people are dying all around me." Yet I have been lucky enough to be relatively shielded from the haunt of death. My grandparents, young enough. My friends and family, wealthy and privileged enough. What little contact I've had with death has gone horrifically awry. When a classmate suddenly died of the flu, informed to me via school e-mail, I sobbed, in the most ugly way, trembling, grabbing what work of his I still had in my school folder, absorbing every word of the dead.
I wasn't there. It didn't happen to me. Yet I can't figure out why it's so impossible for me to deal with. When we visited the memorial at the library, I couldn't stay there for more than a few minutes. All the shoes, all the names. I couldn't erase the image of an old man, just having finished a marathon, falling to his knees after the explosion. When I got my first job out of college, I worked at Sugar Heaven, a candy store just twenty feet away from where the explosion happened. Every day going into work I saw the memorial for the four lives that were lost. I always lingered on the picture of the eight-year old boy who was there.
And my boss was a huge asshole who was always trying to get us to sell more than we did last year. Last year's sales were great, he said. Of course they were. There was a terrorist attack right outside your store.
So I think about that often, too. About how tragedy is good for business, about how terror is good for profits.
On the night of the Fleetwood Mac concert, the night of the 18th, we were all left in suspense as news of the shoot-out trickled through. The older brother, who had been the younger's life and light, had been run over by a car. The younger stowed away in a boat in someone's backyard in Watertown, Massachusetts. There he wrote a message so desperate and contradictory, seeking some kind of redemption, that it honestly hurts to read. Now I don't like killing innocent people, it begins. Much of it is riddled by bullet holes... parts of it completely unreadable.
I am not for the death penalty. But when I heard the Boston Bomber had been sentenced to death row, I felt relief. A gladness I struggle to comprehend. I wasn't there. It did not happen to me. Yet I wanted somebody dead. And still do.
In the aftermath, after one bomber had been killed and the other detained, there was an electric joy in the city that is hard to translate into words. Folks were gathered at the rotunda in the Boston Common, waving flags and singing the National Anthem. People were happy to be American. Happy to be alive.
I was young enough to believe in a more useful dichotomy: that the police were good, and our assailants, bad. I was scared enough to accept the State as my savior.
People cheered police cars as they passed on the street. I wondered what America I was living in. It was a full year before Mike Brown was killed, and the following years would bring more names that demand remembering, for the sake of their unjust deaths at the hand of institutional white supremacy: Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, Freddie Gray, Jamar Clark, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile. So many people of color had died before. But it wasn't until Mike Brown's death in 2014 that Black Lives Matter began to coalesce. There have been so many more deaths since.
I wondered what America I was living in.
Now I am angry enough to take up arms myself, and that agonizes me. I hate guns with all my life. Guns took the stone from humankind's hand and accelerated it. No more guns. Guns took the East Coast. Guns stole the Midwest from the treaties. Guns drove Mexico out of what is now Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Utah, Colorado.
There are two movie theaters near where I live in Aurora, Colorado. I only go to one of them.
The other seems marked with blood.
I want to arm myself. More than my hatred for guns, I hate that I might one day watch people die, helpless. And I refuse to be helpless to hatred. But I can't trust myself with a gun. I have too many times wished my life over. To have an instrument loaded and willing to help me with that wish... is to equip myself with my own coffin. I am not mentally fit enough to own a firearm. So I remain helpless. Armed only with my love.
If there is a lower rung of hell reserved for souls who shoot up churches, mosques, temples, then there is a rung just above that for those who shoot up concerts.
I want to think that anyone who ever does something horrific beyond words didn't want to. That they didn't enjoy it. That while shooting, they hated themselves more than ever and hated their life more than ever and that is why most massacres end with the assailant ending their own life. And as much vitriol as I have in my heart for them, my heart also breaks, endlessly. I want to believe in some twisted alternate reality where murderers have been so thoroughly tortured by their own hate-addled brains that they see no alternative except to disperse their pain among the masses. And that does not excuse it. But I am trying to understand.
And just to place this tragedy in the context of our modern American dilemma, we voted for the gun-control candidate. Everyone always got their digs in at the Clintons for being politically opportunistic, but gun control was one of the only things Hillary supported because she knew how much it is killing us. It wasn't about getting the most votes. Gun control has been a losing battle for Democrats for two decades. Political wisdom says it's over, move on, find another issue to rile up voters. But Hillary Clinton defended her policy because she genuinely believed that it could save lives. And more than gun control, Hillary had a comprehensive plan for mental health centers & affordability. Hillary knew what we were up against, the gargantuan underlying sickness in America that continues to plague us, and that no one solution would fix it. And three million more of us voted for her. We voted for anything policy-wise to be put in place to make this stop. And our dated, lopsided, and counter-intuitive electoral system said fuck you.
Tragedy happens every day in every corner of the globe. We are, by necessity, accustomed to its inevitability. Yet whenever it happens here at home, we are forced to confront our fear of death. We are forced to confront our fear of the darkness closing in, on all fronts, whether it be by way of terror, environmental disaster, or the slow-ticking, fast-ending threat of nuclear war. We are met by our usual sighs and shrugs, the tokens of our desensitization. And it feels helpless, worthless, meaningless. This has no end. This conversation, and this cycle of violence, has no end. That gun prices soar after mass shootings is a sad but unsurprising consequence.. It's how we, as a collective creature, respond to pain. We arm ourselves: whether with guns, facts, or love, we arm ourselves. So that when next the bullets fly, not only will we not be surprised: we will be fed up with it, and done with it, and ready for it. Because there was at least one thing the Boston Bomber got right: If you hurt one, you hurt us all.
