Most Days It’s Enough

I watched CNN for an hour. At my desk. With my laptop open so that the VPN that tricks my computer into thinking it’s still back home could stream the horror show right to me in real time. Back home. Back home where they’re storming the gates, where I keep looking at these…terrorist…white supremacist…something something no words seem enough…on the screen and wondering where they’re hiding their guns. Because I know they have them.

Back home, which I barely feel I’m allowed to say. Back home which is both so viscerally mine, and from which I feel so hollowly insulated by borders and privilege, and the decisions that made me leave it that gnaw at me with gratitude and guilt.

It’s 4:45 and I’m going to pretend to work for an hour. I’m going to keep preparing to teach students what creative nonfiction is, when the nonfiction that’s flashing in front of me zaps all of my creativity and all of my words. I’m going to keep preparing to teach them as if it matters. Because it matters.

And so I turn back to the first few lines of Joan Didion, which I read objectively yesterday as I copied and pasted the link to a syllabus with as much of a professorial “that’ll do” as I have in me. And she says “ In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act.”

And now, at my computer where I’ve been stuck staring into this abyss of terror, mouth open, occasionally shouting back at the commentators so loud I think a neighbour’s going to knock on my door and complain, I let myself weep. Because Joan Didion says that writing is aggressive, and hostile, and I wish it was the only thing that was. Because she says writing is aggressive, and hostile, and I wish the aggression and hostility of all the voices in all the world had been able to stop this.

I’ve turned back to my computer to prepare to teach my students that words matter. That multiple voices matter, and that beautiful language matters. That stories matter. That their stories matter. How to impose themselves on the world. In the best way.

And instead I’m writing and crying, and crying and writing. And I won’t be professorial today, and I know most days I’m not. Most days I’m mostly trying not to impose, or not to impose too much. To make room for the world. Some days I wish the world would fade away. Some days I wish the world was not this. Most of all I wish the world was not this.