Smash Blatt Pop!

Everyone is rather wrapped up in their own lives; certainly I am. I know what I've just done and what I've got to do, and I sort of plod along getting stuff done. Rather like my life is a sphere, my recent past is visible behind me and my soon to be future is in front and I sort of walk along in my sphere, interacting with other people in their spheres, but only if I know them and checking in on the globe sphere occasionally - mostly through the new York times and NPR. Areas of intersection; where my sphere is also a subsets of your sphere.

But every once in a while something happens that breaks into your sphere, an unforeseen intersection, a smashing. And your present is twisted and spun - and someone else is flailing and distressed, distorting your expected path, and then they are gone. Leaving a dark smoke that slowly dissipates until you can't believe that this event happened. And because you didn't know them there is a gap; an impact and no follow up.

This is not my normal kind of post, so please feel free to skip it.

The day before the movers were to come, I was packing in the kitchen, not really listening to the radio. I'm embarrassed to say that it was Prairie Home Companion on the radio. But I wasn't listening closely and I was using packing paper so I was crinkling and noisy. I heard something, it wasn't quite what a packing Sunday was supposed to sound like. I walked into the living room and stared at the radio. It is pretty obvious that you will never hear on Prairie Home Companion actual anguish, Garrison Keillor never writes "Oh God! Help me, Please Help Me! Dear God Help!"

Clearly something was wrong in Sacramento that day. So I walked outside and didn't see anything, and called something out like "Do you need help?" And a young woman flung herself up the stairs at me; crawling. Luckily G., the woman in the next apartment over came out. M., the young woman, was hysterical, she had long brown hair with punk red streaks and a white t-shirt and white skirt, brown hippie boots. G. and I got M. up off the ground. M. had come home just now and found that her boyfriend had shot himself in the head while she was gone. So I left M. in G's arms and called 911.

That sounds so factual, but it wasn't experienced that way. I can still hear M.'s shrieks in my mind, her repetitive shouting, trying to give us information, trying to make sense of what had happened. Her grief and guilt. While she was so upset she couldn't remember her mother or father's phone numbers, she was able to get out an astonishing amount of information. Stuff that I would never have known, since she and her boyfriends were not very visible in the apartment complex. They had cars that had bumper stickers that were references to some obscure bit of popular culture that I didn't grok. Later C. and I went and looked at the bumper stickers - "There's that kid on the escalator again" - from some Kevin Smith film. So as a couple, they were "arty" and obviously, very fragile. Something I understand.

Here's what I gathered from M.. They had had a fight, she had spent the weekend at her mom's house. He had promised that he wouldn't do this to her (commit suicide). She didn't think that there were any bullets for the shotgun in the house. (But again, this is Sacramento, and as you can tell from my Armory Sign post, bullets were just minutes away on J Street). Her cats were there. She didn't have keys to the apartment, he had blood in his mouth. It was all her fault, she killed him. She had to make it all better, what would make it all better. They were going to get married. How was she going to tell his mother? He had promised he wouldn't do this to her. He hadn't answered any of her phone calls all weekend. She should have come sooner, she had killed him because she wasn't there. How was it going to get better?

The police came in what I'm sure was a reasonable amount of time but which seemed like forever when you have an hysterical girl on your hands and you don't know why. We got hold of the parents, and they came by. The police took statements. They were professional. M. lost it more and more throughout the day. But the parents, police and police chaplains took her off our hands and we went from holding a moist hysterical young woman with compassion but little ability to by standers.

But there it was, her smashed sphere was rolled away, and my sphere was left smoking.