Hello, and welcome to Sitting in Silence, which is celebrating three years this month.
I’m sorry to start the year on this note, but you may have heard someone attacked my city. I wrote a piece about it for Time Magazine, which was published just two days after the event. But that doesn't mean I’ve stopped thinking about it. I’ll probably never stop thinking about it. Here’s what I’m thinking today. Come with me, won’t you?
Somewhere in the dark black of space is a meteor heading toward Earth to churn us into powder. Our galaxy spins through the void as does our planet, which you would think would keep us safe, but some celestial archer decided a long time ago how this is supposed to play out.
New Year’s Eve 2024, under the pitch dark of a so-called Black Moon, a man in a pickup truck sped through the Henderson Swamp en route to New Orleans. A hateful tourist, he had been planning this last awful visit for months.
For years now, Mama has pointed out that a black mole appeared on Dad’s stomach—I saw it myself—not long before he was diagnosed with the viscera cancer that would take him. I don’t quite believe that the two are related, but if she’s correct then the black dot was a warning beacon sent from somewhere by something.
I’ve yet to meet anyone willing to talk who isn’t chained to the Earth by loss. A spouse. A child. A dream. It might be easier if we could have someone wipe the past from our memory, so we don’t spend the rest of our lives dragging behind us the corpse of what was.
The dinosaurs were evaporated by a meteor. We know that now, but it took us about 68 million years to figure it out. We had to do the math and collect remnants from the cold earth to teach us.
The damage is never contained. Every missile that kills a target creates a plume of fire that consumes.
I was inspired to write this post when I realized that 2025 makes 11 years since we buried my father. I’m a person of faith (yes, I believe there’s a God; if one can give one’s soul to a politician or a musician, then why not to the Great Spirit all our ancestors woke up dreaming about?) and a New Orleans person (we throw a parade with a jazz band when our beloveds die; why just sit and cry? That’s not what they would have wanted…) So my reconciliation with Dad’s passing wasn’t as dark as it might have otherwise been, but it still left a mark.
Every loss is an explosion that leaves collateral damage. Everyone networked into the system will be infected by a virus of sadness. Flames consume everything near the site of impact. The center collapses.
I hadn’t realized it until now, but some part of me believed that a decade was a proper period of mourning, one of several mourning periods associated with great loss. During the days following the death of a loved one, everything is grayed out as though our face has been wrapped in a veil. The first year stings the most as everyone you meet and every place you go finds you searching for traces of him.
The practical effect of the New Orleans killer may be a hardening of my home, the arteries of the city becoming clogged with plaque.
I talked to an old man last week who described the glory days of flying when you could arrive five minutes before a flight, buy a ticket with no ID, hug your loved ones, and fly away. They keep telling us that the world is getting easier and better, but I think they’re lying to us.
Anytime I want to leave the Earth, I’ve got to get there a couple of hours early, just in case an alarm goes off as I pass through the scanner that decides my worth. The truly worthy don’t pass through scanners. They have their own planes. Even as I have been shaken down “randomly” less often as my hair grays and my wrinkles proliferate, the lighter skinned—but not white—people with names that catch in the back of the throat get strip searched more and more, but I digress.
The blast zone is always bigger than we think it is. Ask Hayao Miyazaki or any elder Japanese person. The rolling light of Pompeii that kills as it flows across ancient Rome or the lava of Maui or the many floods of Egypt or the mass deportations that will start sometime in some unknown month of this calendar year, hidden behind a thin flap like the days of an advent calendar.
Every time I lose someone, I’m foolish enough to think the pain is limited in time and place. That loss does not trail behind me like a very long scarf flapping behind a convertible.
I was told never to fall in love with my own sadness, but what else can I fall in love with once they’re gone?
I can’t forget that 14 people were crushed to death that night. Nor can I forget the dozens who were injured and who are trying to recover as I type this. Having spent the past hard six months trying to come back from a foot that was literally turned the wrong way around, I know how it feels to hope to recover from wounds other people can’t see.
The dinosaurs don’t have to worry anymore. But I do. We do. I worry about my city during all the gatherings we like to hold from the Superbowl in one month to all the theoretical Carnival seasons stretching on to infinity as in a hall of mirrors.
I don’t want a society where revelers feel like prisoners. I don’t want a world where the thump of a tire on a curb presages senseless obliteration. Like all people, I just want to live.
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