A few days ago IOZ put up a one-line post indicating that he’s done with blogging. If that’s true, I’m really going to miss him.
I got into a bit of an argument with my history teacher when Obama started bombing Libya. “Well what would you have him do?” he asked, and I told him nothing. Stay home. Blowing things up is a problem, not a solution. He rolled his eyes, turned to the rest of the class and quipped “I guess that’s why we have free speech.” I wanted to grab him by the collar and start screaming. “They are dropping bombs! Really, really big ones! They fall on people and then those people are dead, you dumb motherfucker! And always, always, every single god damned time, a lot of those people will be people you didn’t mean to drop a bomb on!” When people are rolling their eyes at you because you’re suggesting blowing people up is a bad thing, it’s nice to have an eloquent, reassuring voice. From one of my favorite posts:
Last week, after four years nearly to the day, my boyfriend and I split up. We were living together in the home that we bought last year. There was almost no aspect in which our lives were not intertwined: we worked together on projects and events, gave our time to the same causes, had the same circles of intimates, hell, wore each other’s clothes. I think he treated me horribly and inhumanly, with a callous and wanton cruelty that only barely covered his own fear, sadness, and ambivalence. I am sure he feels similarly about me. I am not sure that we’re not still in love; I think, probably, that we are.
It’s one thing to go to sleep alone after being used to have a body beside you. You can read until your eyes shut and the book falls from your hands, or you can count your breath backwards out of consciousness, or you can go to a friend’s house and have one extra, soporific glass of wine with dinner. It’s quite another to wake up alone, with no body beside you, with no tricks or techniques but to swing your legs over the side of the bed and walk to the bathroom through a closet still full of the detritus of your shared life. Like every other life, mine has had its share of hurts and disappointments, but I’ve never felt so utterly defeated, weak, and directionless, nor ever felt that the air was just too thick to breathe, nor that I might as well just stay in bed forever, until my stomach shrinks into itself and my heart shuts up in my ears. I nearly wept on the bus—the bus! I can’t concentrate. I hurt palpably, as if deep water were crushing me. I feel utterly bereft, without worth or hope.
Now if this is how I feel after something so quotidian as a break-up; if I feel my frankly comfortable, untroubled life to be exploding into a thousand sorrows just because my lover and I reached an impasse that we couldn’t negotiate together; if such bleakness, helplessness, and desperation as I’ve never felt in my life can come from something so insubstantial as having to buy new furniture or a new jacket because he’s taking my favorites; if I am wracked by fear—real, true fear as I haven’t felt since I was a child—about being alone for a while; then just how the fuck must it feel to be an Iraqi or an Afghani or a Palestinian? If it’s bad to lose a lover in Pittsburgh, what must it be like to see your family killed, or your husband kidnapped, or your home destroyed in Baghdad?
