loss

To borrow a sentiment from Steph's blog...God, it fucking hurts again.

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A couple of weeks ago a graduating medical student was killed by a car outside of our dorm building, at an intersection we've all crossed hundreds of times. She walked along a red light, following a truck that was doing the same, and the car going green didn't see her. I was struck ajar at how much it affected me, the people around me, and the Yale community as a whole. There are many factors, I think--her youth, an emanating sweetness that seemed to touch those to whom she was unknown, proximity and inclusiveness. I don't really have anything new or insightful to say about the tragedy, neither its obvious immensity nor its subtleties. I'm sorry for that, but I'm glad there are many people who will do her memory full justice.

A few days after it happened, I read a short story called Found Objects about a woman who compulsively stole personal items. She didn't steal from stores, just people. She didn't steal for monetary or other gain; she didn't use any of the items she took. She piled them onto a table in her home, separate from all else in her life. She took a screwdriver from the back pocket of a plumber, a wallet left by a woman in the bathroom, bath salts from her best friend. The climax of the story was when she rummaged through the wallet of a one-night-stand and found a scrap of paper, saved through time and place, on it scrawled: I believe in you. She took it and never returned it. You could tell she hated herself for it. And you could tell she didn't know how else to be. It wasn't about the addictive thrill of getting away with the crime. It was about collecting pieces of people, and hurting them and hurting because of it.

It caught my eye in the New Yorker while I was in the waiting room at the pharmacy, because the title made me think of a short column I read once in the magazine about a person who collected people's lost gloves, storing them away in the hopes that someday one would find its other half. Found Objects turned out to have a very different theme, and it wasn't so much about things being found as being lost.

On the same day that we mourned the world losing Mila, I lost something separate and large in my life. It felt selfish, yet fitting at the same time, to be consumed by this multifaceted pain. What I lost, I lost because I was a little stupid, a little careless and not brave enough. Natural things that afflict most, and things sewn into all of us, and things grown out of circumstances and other people's mistakes too. So I'm learning to not place too much blame on myself but that doesn't decrease responsibility or the quite awful realization of your own capacity to cause pain.

I felt a bit like the woman who steals, and it makes me think of the driver of the car in Mila's accident. Granted that no one will ever suffer like those close to her--but the driver must suffer too, knowing what his mistake (and it was no one's clear or full fault) did to a life and having to live with that always. I feel a sort of immense sorrow for him, and I worry this is a little unfair and not right, but it seems to me that pain can't be too relative. It hurts very much to be hurt, and it hurts very much to inflict the hurt upon someone else. The driver on Frontage Street, the woman in Found Objects, and me, different beads on the same string.

Nowadays when I see people crossing that intersection against traffic when the light's red, I get a little sad because they don't know any better. And nowadays, when I do the same, I get a little sad because I do.