This one is going to be a doozy.

To the best of my understanding at this time, eight people were murdered in Atlanta, Georgia, last Tuesday. Seven of them were women, and six of them were Asian women. If I’m wrong about this, I’ll try to put out corrections in a future post.

Hello, friend. I need a moment to breathe.

I want to take a moment to think about death. To think about what that means. To think about the absence of life.

And then I want to take a moment to think about dying. About the last moments of a life. About how most of us want to go out – safe, surrounded by loved ones, or nuzzled one last time by a familiar snout of a cat or a dog, or sleeping.

I want to take the moment and think about what it must be like for the last moments of a life to be filled with confusion, shock, fear, pain, horror. The last moments of the first person perspective experience of this world, spent like this.

I want to take a moment to think about what it must feel like to get up in the morning and not know that this was going to be your last day alive.

Grief. I want to talk about grief.

I want to think about that phone call. The first moment you hear that news. The immediate need to find somewhere to sit down. The tears. The attempt to remember the last time you spoke with them.

Think about times when we’ve all lived through the rest of that day, after hearing the news. And that week, and that month, and that year.

I don’t know what it’s like to loose someone like this. Not in this specifically horrible way. And I don’t mind saying that I hope I never know this pain. I hope I never inflict this pain on others. I would not wish this on anyone.

I have met death in other ways. I’ve lost creatures and people whom I knew or loved in violent unexpected ways, and long, drawn out, and tired ways. But it was never like this.

My heart goes out to the people in the lives of these eight people who were killed.

As for the person who did this – I felt shaken when I realized that he is the same age as me. Maybe even younger.

We talked about him in philosophy class, yesterday. One classmate says he ought to be tortured, slowly, for the rest of his days, because death is too good for him. One classmate says he does deserve to die.

I would rather not kill anyone at all, actually. I don’t know that it would make any difference. Those eight people would still be gone. And I don’t want to deprive him of all of the time he could spend alive in the knowledge of what he has done. All those sleepless nights. Honestly, I don’t want him to deprive of the pain of remorse.

That felt cold. I’m not often cold, but sometimes I can be.

That’s enough for right now.

I think this individual is one manifestation of a problem that runs deep and very wide and right now it’s growing. I’m specifically referring to rise in hate crimes directed towards Asian folks since the beginning of the pandemic, because… well. People wanted somebody to blame for their problems, a scapegoat for all of the hurt. And it’s wrong. It’s exactly what happened to Jewish folk in Germany. And look what happened then.

It makes sense to look for a reason to explain why the world hurts so much. I get it. I understand the impulse. But please, not like this. Please don’t make it the fault of people who seem different on the outside. Please. There’s so much diversity among us, within us, between us, and it’s a beautiful thing. We don’t have to be afraid of it. We don’t have to shove the others to the edges, like they’re somehow less. Because they’re not. Nobody is.

Maybe there’s something that all of us can do to keep things like this from happening. Maybe. I don’t know.

Because… yeah.

I need to breathe.

I want to think about what it means to a person to know that they are especially at risk. And to never feel truly safe, anywhere. I want to think about what it means for many different people who share a similar burden to speak up and say, “we don’t feel safe,” and for nobody to listen. Until it was too fucking late, for some of them.

When a person or a group of people is telling you that they’re being targeted, that they’re in danger and that they need help…

Fucking listen.

The Chinese food place in town burned down at the beginning of the pandemic. There’s another place a little bit south of us, and one near the college that I’m currently attending. I want to go to them and give them my patronage. I don’t know how they’re faring in this place and during this time, but I want them to still be here and be doing okay once we get through all of this. I’ve been peripherally aware of this since a friend invited me to do something similar at the very beginning of all of this, a year ago. I haven’t been very good about doing this, but right now seems like a good time.

It seems like a small thing, but I think it matters. This is something which I can do, even in the middle of everything. Because sometimes engaging with community in a bunch of little ways on a very local level is the best that anyone can do, especially during the hard times.

These are hard times. I’m beginning to wonder if this is just how the world is, if my expectations of ease are naive. If that is the case, I think I’m going to need a thicker skin.

Writing helps me, like it always does.

Thank you for reading. I hope you’re alright, today.