“I’ve been having these weird thoughts lately…like is any of this for real, or not?” Sora.
What a rough couple of months. I am thinking now about the 19 dead children. And then I am not. The gas prices! Nearly $6 a gallon and though the car I drive is, as they say, dope as hell, it is also thirsty—ravenous, really—for petrol.
I am thinking of the 19 dead children and then I am not because I am thinking about the dead children in Ukraine, and the dead adults of course, and the adults that will continue dying.
I am googling how many are dead from COVID-19 worldwide—No. In America. Yes. 1.01 million. Million. Was the .01 there when I started writing daily? I don’t recall. I’m considering opening my older piece, It Is Finished, to check. No, I won’t. But I’ll link to it, of course.
And I am thinking of the 19 dead children.
It is too late. Now I’m thinking about Miah Cerrillo, a survivor of the Uvalde shooting. A fourth grader who, in a prerecorded video, testified before congress about the horrific deaths of her friends and teacher.
"When I went to the backpacks, he shot my friend that was next to me, and I thought he was going to come back to the room, so I grabbed a little blood and put it all over me. I got my teacher's phone and called 911 … I told her that we need help, and to send the police in our classroom." Miah Cerrillo.
I am thinking about the blood. I have not watched the footage from the hearing, I can only read about it. I am thinking about the teacher struck down in room 111, listening to his students dying. “You [policemen] have a bulletproof vest. I have nothing,” Arnulfo Reyes told Good Morning America.
I am thinking of the policemen who didn’t enter for 40 minutes and I am thinking of the 19 dead children and the parent who leaped a fence to rescue her own children minutes after being released from handcuffs. Could the number have been lower?
Some of the children were unrecognizable because the gun was so powerful it—
No, no, no. Something else. Something else.
I’ve been thinking a lot about What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky by Lesley Nneka Arimah. In the titular story from the collection, mathematicians have discovered a formula to change the minds and bodies of other people—a kind of magic.
The story takes place in the future, after a great deal of social, national, and economic upheaval. Colonialism has reshuffled the world yet again, and as a result there is still war, refugees, and widespread death and suffering. And grief.
One kind of magical math enables flight. Another allows a mathematician to plot sadness and grief on an axis, to balance and account for the death, trauma, and suffering and then…cancel it out. Memories are not erased, the subject merely becomes detached and dissociated from their grief. They heal.
The story has stuck with me ever since I first heard it on the Levar Burton podcast. There is something gorgeous about it. The text is sparse but beautifully rendered, making even mathematics seem mystical and exciting. And it paints. A vivid world of suffering, of new, but predictable colonialism. Of new wars. Of new refugees. New pain.
And the woman who takes it away.
I’m going to spoil the story. In the end, the grief mathematician attempts to help her friend, someone in the same line of work as her, who has seemingly gone mad. But for her efforts to balance out the equation she finds the grief turning back on her, driving her mad, rotting her away from within.
“The last clear thought she would ever have was of her father, how crimson his burden had been when she’d tried to shoulder it, and how very pale it all seemed now.”
The story is named the way it is because a man who has mastered the formula for flight falls from the sky. Because, unbeknownst to our protagonist, there is a flaw in the code. Shouldering the grief of others, erasing that grief, ultimately undoes her.
I am thinking about the parents. I am thinking about how there is no one to take their grief away. There is no justice—their child murderer is dead, likely as he intended—and no solace. Congress will not be convinced by their testimony, by Miah’s testimony. By anyone’s.
Gun control likely isn’t coming. The violence will likely continue. The world is getting hotter. And we are all crunching and compartmentalizing our grief and the suffering of the world around us as people have always done. And I am wondering how this can be real. How this world can really exist as it does.
I am wondering when our calculators will fail us.
I have no words to support you with, no words to make the tension in your mind dissipate, no words that could ever make what we’re living through make sense.
But I thank you for this post, cruel reminder that it is, for trying to write reason into existence and for reminding us that everything sucks. But we can do better. We must, in the small ways that we can.