Enough, now
I'm growing out a shaved-back-and-sides haircut. It's fucking tiresome. Never do it. Or, you know, do it. But there will be ~consequences~.
On the recommendation of a friend last autumn, I picked up a copy of Marisa De Los Santos's book, Love Walked In. It sounds like a festival of corn and cheese, I know. But! It is only a little bit cheesy, and the right amount of corny. Just enough. I found lots of sentences that made me sit back and smile at the over-bright lights of the subway. I have been reading a lot more recently, which is a welcome thing; my Kindle battery ran out a couple of times, and I was only mildly irritated at the inconvenience. Reading is always a gift.
A terrible, terrible thing happened to at least 49 LGBT people in Orlando, Florida. They were the target of a man who walked into Pulse, a gay club, on Latin night, and decided to open fire. Nearly half of the people murdered were Puerto Rican. The weight of the lives lost is staggering to comprehend, and that is before we count the wounded, the traumatised, the (hopefully temporarily) broken, and before we consider the lifelong reverberations that will be felt by all their loved ones. I have found myself bursting into tears at inopportune moments at the sheer horror of the act, which I have read is the most fatal mass shooting on American soil.
It's all awful, but the element that keeps coming back to me – the element that always comes back to me in shootings similar to this one – is that so many people heard their death coming. They heard it reloading ammunition and stalking towards them. And some people had a little time to call for help. Or perhaps more resignedly, to call to tell their people that they were scared they were about to die, and that they loved them. And it always tears me up inside that for so many people, their Designated Person – the person they call for comfort, to feel whole, to seek refuge in, or just to trust – is often their mother. People call their mothers and they cry and they tell them they love them, and they seek the warmth of their love – perhaps the first love they ever knew in this world – for the last time. That breaks my heart. For the mothers, yes, and for the babies.
This is not how life is supposed to be.