terminal.

Lost and wandering in the wilds of this small adventure
they walk down sidewalks and kiss beside dry and dusty fountains.
They pretend to have money but share their plates of food.
The laugh at people and they make love and they share secrets
under the face of an indifferent moon

You weren't very interested, she said.
I was but you weren't looking, he replied.
You must tell me: Why do you stay with me,
when the whole world, and a glorious sun,
and the admiration of a thousand lovers,
and a girl who doesn't cry all the time, await you?
she asked, and folded the blanket they shared.
Picked up a shirt; halved and quartered it;
watched his face contemplate pasts.
I don't know, he replied. Except that sometimes
your laugh is a cage I mourn to leave the
beauteous comfort of.

The dangerous comfort, she thought.
The ending.

Death and Morality, or, The Huge Bummer

After a tipsy debate at the brewery last night-- or rather, upon listening to two guys hash out the meaning/non-meaning of life, again-- the only bits I can remember are those regarding death, murder, and morality, and the theory of choice.

The question was whether or not any of us could take a life. Naturally, the conclusion was that none of us wishes to kill anyone, and that we all hope that if we found ourselves in a situation where the possibility was presented, that we hope we choose not to. Choice was the key factor. The whole discussion, really, was about choices. But today I find I keep coming back to the topic of death and morality. 

My childhood best friend was kidnapped and murdered by a mentally unstable criminal who'd "slipped through the cracks", as they say. It took two months and 4 days to find her body. Just 45 miles north of her home from where she was taken, she was left near an abandoned, rusted paper mill cluttered with wildflowers and rattlesnake grass. You can see the mill from Highway 101, it's so close, yet if the man who'd killed her hadn't come forward, her body would likely have never been found. The area surrounding the mill is a black hole of carelessness; it is easily overlooked, nearly invisible, on long forgotten land visited only by animals and travelers' dust spinning off the highway. Now it is a shrine to missing children all over the country and world, decorated with wilting stuffed animals and the fading pages of letters written to the disappeared and dead. It is an echoing mecca of grief, from a pilgrimage made by heartbroken families with no where else to go.

And It is a constant reminder, to me, that I will never understand the world or humanity enough to absolutely, definitively, know what I am capable of.

Before my friend's death, I wasn't sure what capital punishment was. I didn't understand the meaning of either argument because I was a child. When she died, I had only the reactions of those surrounding me and of strangers to gauge what it could mean. I observed her mother, a stalwart no-nonsense and kind hearted person, become inwardly shattered, quiet, with a terrible grief that was too deep and terrifying to look upon. The only conclusion the mother could draw was that there was no point to killing the murderer of her daughter-- because her daughter was gone. That was the only truth she could see. What was once there no longer existed, though her heart and body and mind could not understand it fully, and never would. To take another life had absolutely no meaning. 

I observed her father-- who'd taken my friend and me to Disneyland just five months prior, which was among one of the last times I saw my friend-- abandon his former self. Her father was a open wound, his anger a weapon slicing open every darkened corner to find answers that would never appear. He fought outwardly. He made his grief malleable and marched onward with it outstretched before him, presenting it to congressmen, the president of the United States, the world, knowing absolutely that this man who'd murdered his daughter should die-- because she was no longer there. What once existed was gone, poof, just like that. His heart and body and mind couldn't grasp it, and never would. To take the life of the man who'd taken his daughter's meant everything.

Then there was the public. There were bizarre, fringe reactions, like women who wanted to marry the murderer, people who were convinced her father had her killed, people who blamed her mother because she had left a window unlocked. I remember strangers approaching me at vigils and burying my head in their bosoms, weeping for me, praising "The Lord", and I had no idea why. I remember many of my friends not talking to me because I had some kind of invisible mark upon me, now that I had known someone who'd died so sensationally. The farther people are from the core of any situation the clearer they think they can see things, I learned. The dividing lines of the public separated opinion into three easy pieces: Kill the "monster"; don't kill the "human"; it isn't "our" decision either way. But then there was what was going on inside of me. In my twelve-year old brain I felt myself becoming a "monster". 

I began having dreams that I was killing people. It was always someone I knew and hated, someone who existed peripherally in my life, and occasionally someone who affected me directly. One was a man who'd hit my sister. One was a man who had touched me at school. One was a man who'd whistled at me when I walked down the street-- a grizzle-faced white man old enough to be my grandfather. I dreamt that I stabbed one in the head with a pencil, in one ear and clear through the other, head soft as a birthday cake. The blood was hot on my hand and arm. I dreamt that I pushed one down a dark stairwell into a basement full of water, and tossed a live wire down after him, watching with a clear, clean sense of peace as he convulsed to death in the tepid black liquid. But I also dreamt that I met my friend's murderer, and I sat on one side of a glass panel while he sat on the other, and all I did was stare at him, my heart trying to beat through my chest, my throat aching to scream at him. I was frozen, deaf and dumb. I didn't know why.

I came to all sorts of conclusions in the aftermath of my friend's death and all of the emotional fallout that followed. One was the realization of how precious my loved ones were. I was a goddamned walking Hallmark card. But I was quiet about it, because I felt that the realization was something delicate, an egg or a porcelain teacup, too fragile to be flaunted.

One was that none of us has any control of anything, at all. We have choices, and hopes and wishes, but there is no control. This stemmed from my new-found conviction that "god" as it was explained, mostly in Christianity, was a tragic sham. I observed it used as an excuse not to deal with grief, but to handily tag a child's death to "a reason". That angered me, even as a twelve year old, because of course there was no reason for her death. I found that it dishonored her memory-- and our own grief-- to try to find one. 

One was that I didn't understand grown-ups at all.

And, finally, I came to believe that I was capable of killing someone; not murdering, not intentionally taking a life unprovoked. And not easily; not without the possibility of unquenchable regret, or anger at myself, or disappointment in my own weakness. If someone was trying to kill me or hurt me badly, or if someone was trying to kill someone I loved, or if a grown human was trying to hurt or kill a child, I couldn't say I wouldn't kill them. Simply because I believe people are, in a way, two beings: That which rationalizes and tries to make sense of things-- the "self", the "ego", always trying to rise above the animal for reasons we can't explain, human reasons. And then there is the animal, who simply feels things, physical and emotional. Hunger, thirst, exhaustion; fear, love, hate, grief, joy. There is no explicable reason, and there shouldn't be. Because in end, as we lay dying, there is no choice, that is all we are: dumb, wonderful, tragically emotional animals.