waking & feeling the fell of dark

i feel very reluctant writing about death.

well, let me clarify - i can discuss death in the abstract.  i can write about the impact of death, the mysteries of death.  how death is portrayed in books and films.

but i find it nearly impossible to write about it on a personal level.

i don't think i have exactly figured myself out on this, but i think it comes down to a mixture of things. one would be that i just can't seem to wrap all the events, the emotions, and the effects of it into words.  the way i can just kind of think and ponder about certain inconsequential or lighthearted topics (food, korean-ness, the la vs ny dichotomy, relationships, etc) and pump out some vain opinion or another, i can't do the same about this topic. not necessarily because it's a "sensitive" issue, but because it's that much harder to form a more singular, packaged idea/thesis about the whole thing.

they say words/stories can breathe people back to life.  i still remember one of my favorite books we had to read back in school was tim o'brien's the things they carried. in the book, there was a poignant chapter on the narrator losing his childhood love (linda) to cancer and how he dealt with it (years later) by writing her into his stories. i remember i loved this particular story so much, i cried when reading it. i even remember reading it to my boyfriend (at the time) on the phone - though i'm pretty sure he couldn't have cared less.  however in this chapter, i realized that through the craft of storytelling, tim wasn't saving linda's life, but saving his own.

and then it dawned on me that writing about it would ultimately just be a selfish move on my part (at his expense). i don't have the "right" or the authority to write about it.  i don't want that person's life (or the memories of his life) to be made immortal through my words (especially since i wouldn't know if it would be against his will).  all these words would probably be for my own benefit or my own need for "closure" and/or self-expression - a means of coping.

so that is why (or at least partially why) i can't write.

i was re-reading excerpts of joan didion's the year of magical thinking.  she is so spot-on that she has a way of making me short of breath and drown in her grief.

must-read (esp all you californian/new yorkers)

Joan Didion's "Goodbye to All That"

"It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends. I can remember now, with a clarity that makes the nerves in the back of my neck constrict, when New York began for me, but I cannot lay my finger upon the moment it ended, can never cut through the ambiguities and second starts and broken resolves to the exact place on the page where the heroine is no longer as optimistic as she once was. When I first saw New York I was twenty, and it was summertime, and I got off a DC-7 at the old Idlewild temporary terminal in a new dress which had seemed very smart in Sacramento but seemed less smart already, even in the old Idlewild temporary terminal, and the warm air smelled of mildew and some instinct, programmed by all the movies I had ever seen and all the songs I had ever read about New York, informed me that it would never be quite the same again. In fact it never was. Some time later there was a song in the jukeboxes on the Upper East Side that went “but where is the schoolgirl who used to be me,” and if it was late enough at night I used to wonder that. I know now that almost everyone wonders something like that, sooner or later and no matter what he or she is doing, but one of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.

Of course it might have been some other city, had circumstances been different and the time been different and had I been different, might have been Paris or Chicago or even San Francisco, but because I am talking about myself I am talking here about New York. That first night I opened my window on the bus into town and watched for the skyline, but all I could see were the wastes of Queens and big signs that said MIDTOWN TUNNEL THIS LANE and then a flood of summer rain (even that seemed remarkable and exotic, for I had come out of the West where there was no summer rain), and for the next three days I sat wrapped in blankets in a hotel room air conditioned to 35 degrees and tried to get over a cold and a high fever. It did not occur to me to call a doctor, because I knew none, and although it did occur to me to call the desk and ask that the air conditioner be turned off, I never called, because I did not know how much to tip whoever might come—was anyone ever so young? I am here to tell you that someone was. All I could do during those years was talk long-distance to the boy I already knew I would never marry in the spring. I would stay in New York, I told him, just six months, and I could see the Brooklyn Bridge from my window. As it turned out the bridge was the Triborough, and I stayed eight years."

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