I'm at work this morning, after staying home yesterday, but I'm not sure if I can stay here much longer. Any even vaguely appropriate words seem fantastically out of reach right now. I can't concentrate; I can either distract myself with totally trivial things like video games, or I sit and stew. I suppose this is grief, but it feels so depthless and oscillating and all-encompassing that a single word is nowhere near sufficient. I've never lost a friend like this before. I've felt little or no anger, at least until this morning. It's one thing to throw around extreme rhetoric when motivated by solidarity; it's another when it's suddenly embodied as a lance thrust in your side. It becomes both appropriate and unreal, when the worst accusations you could make are realized in an intensely personal way. The Israeli government are murderers. Israeli soldiers are murderers. In addition to an incredibly brave, compassionate, intelligent American girl, they murdered ten other defenseless Palestinians Sunday, one of them a toddler. Now they're insulting her memory and our intelligence.
People here have been wonderful. There was an impromptu vigil followed by a memorial at the Capitol Theater Sunday night. Many people got up and said wonderfully nice and moving things. But I can't share this with them. Our relationship predated our time at Ev*rgreen, and nearly all mutual friends from that time are scattered. My memories of her are very different from those being shared; memories of our travels through Europe, of talking and smoking in the cold overlooking Capitol Lake and the piers and marinas stretching out into Puget Sound. I'd already lost nearly all of my ties to this town, and this just exacerbates that sense of (self-imposed) isolation. I think this would be so much easier to take if I wasn't here, if all this community goodwill didn't feel so suffocating.