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Or Kill Me / Heartbreak
« on: April 27, 2012, 06:09:09 pm »
The first time I saw it I was four and they told me the dinosaurs were dead, and no, none of them survived. Not even the ones that were hiding palm trees. No, they're dead.
The next time I wasn't much older, and Jim Henson passed away. Pneumonia, they said. He decided not to get treatment. Almost like a suicide.
I saw it in my best friend on the playground. We were making a thousand cranes to wish for peace and one misshapen paper bird had been found outside. We crumpled it up for our pretend compost project, and she cried and screamed to get it out and fix it, because her brother was in Iraq.
And then the parade of "not good enough" and "not dedicated enough" and "you can do better than this" that is the school system, not a single moment of heartbreak but a long, slow, grinding process, wearing down the vertebrae one by one.
The deaths of not my loved ones but the loved ones of those close to me hurt. They knocked me down and stole my lunch money and my last shreds of faith in an omnipotent and sympathetic deity. But these weren't moments of heartbreak, not really.
The next time I felt real heartbreak I was seventeen. It was 2000, and I watched helpless as the politics of my parents and my town and the adults I cared about and those of my peers were steamrolled by a Supreme Court ruling and a coordinated effort to fuck the polls.
After that, it was the Tuesday morning I slept in and came downstairs to find my father crying.
I wrapped myself in a cocoon of apathy and meandered through life for the better part of a decade, til I found the courage to love again.
And we tried.
And the young Iranian couple showed up on the Daily Show, saying hello to Jon Stewart from the heart of Tehran, green wristbands waving. It had been filmed a week before. There was no way of knowing if they had been in the protests, if they had been captured, or tortured, or killed.
Heartbreak is when your daughter asks if she can trust the government, and you know the answer is no and there's no way you can fix it before it becomes her generation's problem.
Heartbreak isn't about a person. Heartbreak is when you see the terrible in the world -- not the Horror, just the normal, run of the mill "this is the way the world is" terrible -- and see that there is nothing you can do about it. You cannot be there. You cannot help those people. You cannot affect the things that affect you. And sometimes I'm not heartbroken.
But right now I am.
The next time I wasn't much older, and Jim Henson passed away. Pneumonia, they said. He decided not to get treatment. Almost like a suicide.
I saw it in my best friend on the playground. We were making a thousand cranes to wish for peace and one misshapen paper bird had been found outside. We crumpled it up for our pretend compost project, and she cried and screamed to get it out and fix it, because her brother was in Iraq.
And then the parade of "not good enough" and "not dedicated enough" and "you can do better than this" that is the school system, not a single moment of heartbreak but a long, slow, grinding process, wearing down the vertebrae one by one.
The deaths of not my loved ones but the loved ones of those close to me hurt. They knocked me down and stole my lunch money and my last shreds of faith in an omnipotent and sympathetic deity. But these weren't moments of heartbreak, not really.
The next time I felt real heartbreak I was seventeen. It was 2000, and I watched helpless as the politics of my parents and my town and the adults I cared about and those of my peers were steamrolled by a Supreme Court ruling and a coordinated effort to fuck the polls.
After that, it was the Tuesday morning I slept in and came downstairs to find my father crying.
I wrapped myself in a cocoon of apathy and meandered through life for the better part of a decade, til I found the courage to love again.
And we tried.
And the young Iranian couple showed up on the Daily Show, saying hello to Jon Stewart from the heart of Tehran, green wristbands waving. It had been filmed a week before. There was no way of knowing if they had been in the protests, if they had been captured, or tortured, or killed.
Heartbreak is when your daughter asks if she can trust the government, and you know the answer is no and there's no way you can fix it before it becomes her generation's problem.
Heartbreak isn't about a person. Heartbreak is when you see the terrible in the world -- not the Horror, just the normal, run of the mill "this is the way the world is" terrible -- and see that there is nothing you can do about it. You cannot be there. You cannot help those people. You cannot affect the things that affect you. And sometimes I'm not heartbroken.
But right now I am.
