What Do We Get For Our Trouble and Pain?

Perspective is a difficult thing. Many a budding artist hits her first major snag when it comes to accurately portraying perspective, and so it often is for writers. Sometimes it is a bit easier than it seems, however.

For instance, I thought my Saturday was pretty lousy. I woke up, I cleaned my apartment, and I took a shower in increasingly cold water. I drove to an asian restaurant, drove back home to get my wallet, and went back to the restaurant to order take out. I played Halo 2 with my brother and a friend of ours while I did my laundry. They left, and I ended up spending seven hours washing clothes. I went home, found someone parked in my spot (thanks, OU home game traffic, for fucking with my life again). I found out she had locked her keys in the car. She taught me how to use clothes hangers to break into a car (quick tip: don’t use plastic ones). Sounds like a pretty average day, overall. Perhaps a disappointing way for a young man to spend a Saturday.

Funny thing is, just a few blocks away another young man was coming to terms with some serious emotional problems. It didn’t turn out well. This young man was pretty smart, and pretty well educated. He was smart enough to build a working bomb, and for whatever reason, he chose Saturday evening to take a walk to campus, where he sat down on a bench a couple of blocks away from 80,000 other people and blew himself up. I’ll never understand what made him set out on that course of action, or the final thoughts in his mind before he flashed out of existence, or if what we all think happened is actually what happened.

Yesterday afternoon I walked north on campus, past the bench where a young life came to a violent end two days previously. There was no crater, no visible damage to the surrounding flora, and no way to tell that a bomb had been set off less than 48 hours ago. A brand new bench sat on the ground, secured to brand new concrete, but everyone walking past knew just what was there and what it meant. As I passed by I was eyeballs deep in my own little world. Still, I could not help but cast my view to the new bench, the fresh concrete, and, as I finally passed by, the pained expression on the face of a young woman walking in the other direction. The sadness in her eyes stood out in stark contrast to her pink sorority shirt and bouncy blond hair, and it reminded me how similar we are sometimes. She might have a different reaction than I, or a thousand others passing by that bench do, but the reality and closeness of violence and death provoked a reaction from her, as they do from us all.

I don’t know what it all means, except that no matter how hard we try to be, we’re never truly alone, but we always will be. And that spending a Saturday doing laundry sucks until you compare it with something that really does suck.