Some days I sit down and write and others I sit down and can’t. Today feels like the latter but these are words so what you see is a contradiction. I wonder what the news looks like in America. What kind of coverage you are getting and what kind of coverage you think this deserves.
My high school was what, 2,000 students? Okay, 2,000 students. So let’s take the graduating classes of Lincoln High School from the last 20 years and drown them. Crush them under a building, a car—save the mess of thrashing limbs, debris, sea foam leaking from agape mouths and go ahead and mechanically funnel the ocean directly into their lungs—whatever. They’re gone. And mark them as tallies that'll headline. Pixilated on a TV screen, bolded in the morning paper. Somehow society makes the death of one man more personal than the death of 10,000. One man has a name, an obituary. 10,000 men have a one followed by four zeros. Things like this happen and we don’t take it personally because, well, because it isn’t. Because this is 9,800 miles, a skin color and a language away. We’ve never met these people and we never would have if they were still around. Nothing in your life changes. This morning I stood at the kitchen doorway and watched my host mother hang up the phone with a friend in Ofunato, then punch a wall.
Personal.

Nothing to do with anything

I can’t make you understand. And I’m not sure I’d want you to if you could, on account it wouldn’t be all mine anymore. I also am unsure how it would make you feel. Not the way I feel. It wouldn’t make you feel how I feel. There is console in knowing that no one ever knows how far other people feel the things they might be supposed to feel. Might be supposed to, might be supposed to. All I know is this: you are your own personality, a real everlasting thing, different from anything else. You are unmerge-able, like the sea or the wind. And here you are, and you are not profoundly excited at the thought of living, and I can’t imagine why. And I’m not sure I’d want to if I could.
I’d say most of it was Virginia Woolf. The good parts, anyway. The parts about being nice looking. ‘Not pretty, possibly,’ she drew herself up, ‘but yes, most people would say I was handsome.’ The moment you knew you’d never be beautiful. It must have been quick and subtle, the way the holy ghost passes in and out of a room. Something or other about a heart being too heavy to hold. Something or other. (Omoi.) Stop it, Sarah. You’re not thinking in English anymore. This language won’t break from your fingertips. (Chotto.) Or leak from your pen. It's in my head though. It’s all in my head, I swear, and I wish I could give you more than my word.
Welcome to the day when the whole world turns against you. Wait, no, the ground pulls out from under you. More apt, don’t you think?
You don’t know this kind of quiet. So I’m saying, dear god, someone please shuffle your feet. Someone sniffle or flip a page in your notebook. Everyone’s thinking the same, too. Everyone knows we’re all just as afraid of our own silence, and that none of us have the stomach to break it. And all the sudden the happiest girl in the world is terrified. Terrified of the dark, of the cracks in the sidewalk. And the word ‘damaging’ is stuck in my head since you put it there, like song lyrics you’re embarrassed to know. Words like, “sorry it took a natural disaster,” and “not something 10,000 miles will change.” Words of mine I could never speak, “I miss you. I’ve missed you since I met you. I’ve loved you since you left me.” Words and lies and aches and guts. All the guts you know you have and the strength you thought you had. Damaging damaging damaging damaging. It was something like, “Quit being so happy, Sarah. Today’s just like any other.” And, “that’s what’s so great; I’m this happy everyday.” Then the country’s long/lat(itude) shifts and, “Why do you look so sad, Sarah?” “Why don’t you?” It was something like being unadorned rather than plain. And wishing I’d never met you. Wishing you the kind of hurt I invented just so you might trash that Scarlett O’Hara disclosure. So afraid to be hurt you want to take the lead and hurt first. Something like that. Who can say for sure.
So here I am, and you're here too. Existence needs us. And please don't say it again, don't tell me again that you're “just being yourself.” You talk about it like it’s some sort of achievement. That’s not an achievement. That’s lack of imagination. I deserve the greatest happiness in the world. I know, I know. And I’d give it all to you if I could. If it’d keep me from scratching at night. Or give faces to the figures I can't get out of my dreams. I just want them to have faces, is all. Something about a washed out line at lonely. Missing what you never had. How it would make sense if we didn’t destroy the people we loved. Yet that seems to be all we know. How you’ll never be any different because I won’t let you be. Something or other like that.