Archives for April, 2006

Because I’m lazy and unable to focus right now, my token end of year post will consist of lists.
You were warned.
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I was just regaining my equilibrium today. I realised I had been, out of necessity, associating with people who have a vested interest in maintaining the self-deception that Sukaina’s death is a smaller issue than it is.
“You are one of those people,” said a former professor last night, “who will always be angry.”
And I know this. That I am always angry, always confounded, always befuddled.
“And this is what you’ll do,” he said, “you’ll write.”

He made me feel human again, because he provided the proof I needed that there are people who can see through the rhetoric, and I was so afraid that there must be something wrong with me for not being able to swallow all the words. That maybe I was expecting too much of people, demanding always to see heart.

So today, anyway, I was returning to the usual exam stress, which is to say, returning to normalcy.

Then my little sister called in the evening to tell me that a third grader in her school had gone missing.
And it was the same sickness that rose in my throat: that fear of people.
Update: They found the kid. He was at his aunt’s house.

Until further notice, this is the last post I will be writing about Sukaina.
At present, all I have to give is anger – and it needs some time still to gestate and become constructive anger. (Anger, in and of itself, is not disrespectful.)

For those of you coming from Queen’s and looking for information: you will find no answers here.
But in the meantime, do ask your professors (they were all informed before the students), the administration, your dons, the student journalists, etc. Ask Hitchcock what happened and how we let it happen. Ask everyone you think responsible.

Talk about her.

Organisations never act decently – they act bureaucratically.

At what point do we drop the smooth rhetoric and acknowledge that only the brokenness of our language can come close to accepting our responsibility.

This was a conversation riddled with unfortunatelies, God’s name dropping, and the ever convenient excuse of fate.
He was impenetrable, or maybe it was in reaction to my misplaced anger (which really wanted to be grief, but didn’t know how), or maybe it was me.
It was only when I said “by then the rigor mortis had set in, and they couldn’t close her eyes or her mouth and this is how her parents will see her after a year of not seeing her,” that there was a flicker of emotion on his face.
And then I felt ashamed of myself for exploiting her death – for what?
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During the half hour walk back home I rehearsed the words in my head. In my head, they were flat words, tearless, and dull.

—-
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It was preventable.
A string of misinformations, self-deceptions, and assumptions.

When I hear the news, the first thing I do is go to sleep.
And it’s in my sleep that I attend her funeral: a large, open house with winding staircases and beautiful grounds. And it’s in my dreams that I cry.

Because awake, all I can think of is the times I saw her and made polite conversation, but never stuck around for anything more. All the ways we could have helped and maybe this was preventable, which makes us responsible.
But I don’t feel responsible. I don’t actually feel anything.

When we first moved (back) to Toronto, there was much hammering. At all hours of the night and day my father would hammer, and occasionally we, the oldest two, my brother and I, would be called in to hold planks in place and hammer in sundry nails.
The result was a floor to ceiling wooden bookshelf. It covers one entire wall of the living room and was made to be home to all our books.
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I will one day, when nostalgic for a lake I rarely visited, write an exposition on silence.
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From If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, by Jon McGregor:

We went out for breakfast this morning.
Michael said he owed me.
We went to a place with plastic gingham tablecoths, and big red and yellow containers of squirtable ketchup and mustard on the counter.
The door jangled when we went in, and the woman in a dirty white apron said in a minute love and went into the kitchen.
The radio was playing a rap song, the singer going my name is my name is, over and over again, as if he’d forgotten.