Mamarati

that’s what I thought it was anyway. It was the weirdest thing… Something woke me up, but I wasn’t sure what. And then Jacob came in all sleepy eyed and quiet like and told me he thought someone was at the door.

No one is at the door, I thought, but there must have been a noise. He crawled in bed with me and fell back asleep, but I couldn’t. It felt very off.

When the building was bombed back home, it was like that. A noise like that… woke me up the same way…

So when I turned on the TV and I saw nothing but a screen filled with a streak across the sky, no captioning, nobody speaking any words to say what this was that I was looking at, I thought- we’re being bombed. This is what it looks like when a nuclear weapon is heading for you… I literally almost pissed in my bed. I thought, I have maybe thirty minutes to tell everyone I love that I love them… Thank God Jacob is with me today…

And then, I was unfortunately relieved to see that it was the space shuttle. How sad to find relief in that, but I was just glad that all of humanity as we know it wasn’t about to be wiped out.

And then when they started showing the crew… the first Indian woman in space, who went to the school where I will soon be going… her footsteps all over that campus… The first Israeli, son of holocaust survivors… And I remembered what it was like when I saw the space shuttle explode so long ago… sitting in class, everyone excited, TVs on in every room of our junior high school to watch the take off, and all the silence and shock when that tragedy occurred… My math teacher, the look on her face- I don’t think she knew quite what to do or say… It was such an important day for teachers everywhere, that mission.

And you know what- I cried. Not because I’m sappy or overemotional when it comes to stuff like this… I know I am. But because I really just felt sad, and I felt so… patriotic in some way. Like I really just love this country, and I love what we represent- good things, good life, peace, democracy, the pursuit of happiness, all those ideals… and this felt like such a blow to this country that I love so much. Like these people, who know the risks involved in going into space took those risks anyway for all of us. And now they’re gone.

I hope everyone cried. And I hope everyone felt that… I really do. I feel like, those images of people breaking down that you see of when Kennedy was shot, or those joyous ticker tape parades in NYC at the end of a war… just all those things seem to be missing these days. That unified feeling of loving our nation and doing whatever it takes to defend her or further her ideals… it just seems to be so much less these days. And I don’t think that can be good for us.

Anyway… I don’t know. It’s just sad.

More later, I have things to talk about, but I promised myself for the eightieth weekend now that this pile will be gone. And it’s still not.

Must.Eliminate.Pile.From.Life!