I didn’t intend to go to Occupy Oakland yesterday. I knew there was a mass march but I was waiting for the delivery of our new cheap Ikea bed after our old cheap Ikea bed broke, and I had already resigned myself to a Saturday filled with fighting with confusing furniture directions and fingers made bloody by screws and hammers. But then I watched the disturbing video of police shooting pepper spray down the throats of peaceful student protesters at U.C. Davis, and I couldn’t just sit at my computer and watch anymore. I couldn’t just follow the Twitter hashtags or watch the livefeeds, I had to be there myself. The Davis video was graphic obviously, and outrageous, but somehow it touched something in me that the other reports of police brutality and civil injustice had been reaching towards for months. I haven’t been sleeping well, kept up at night stricken with worry about the direction of our country, fretting over the ease with which police have begun to apply violent force to law-abiding young people with legitimate grievances, worried about the future and if this really is a class war and if it’s even safe to have babies in this world anymore, which is maybe an over-exaggeration but at 3am in the dark under the covers it seems like a legitimate fear. So after seeing that video I knew what I had to do: I had to reschedule the delivery and I had to wrap a scarf around my mouth and I had to go down to Oakland and see what the movement was really about.
Every morning, no matter the weather or the day or how much sleep I’ve gotten, I wake to the same thought. With crackling limbs and crusty eyes, I curl around myself and think: What if I just didn’t go?
What if I stayed home and tossed my phone off the balcony and re-sewed the curtains and wrote letters to all the people I miss? What if I just climbed into the car in my pajamas and drove north until the tenseness in my heart burst, broke open like a crystalline jellyfish and sprawled and unfurled inside my chest? What if I didn’t tell anyone and I just left, took the car and went, stopped at a gas station on the Oregon border to get a coffee and fill the tank? What if I used the rearview mirror and a pair of rusty scissors to chop my hair into a blunt bob, streaks of yellow-red hair collecting on the dashboard, falling between the seats? What if I just drove until I couldn’t anymore, and then found a town with Northwestern pine trees to settle down in, to find a new name and a new sense of self in? What if I just left and never told anyone? What if I just never looked back?
My baby sister Maddie was at a playground with my Dad, a playground next to a flat, grassy knoll that stretches until the horizon cuts it short. It was getting dark but it was early, so the moon, effulgent and glowing, hung low in the sky. It hung so low that it looked like it was touching the grass, like if you walked to the other side of the field you could maybe touch it or casually lean up against it.
Maddie caught on. “Moon!” she shouted and pointed at the beaming sphere. “I got it!” she said, and started ripping across the field to catch the moon.
I’m willing to admit to nosy strangers and curious friends that my family situation is odd. I have one sister four years younger than me, one sister 22 years younger than me, and another sister on the way. Sometimes I worry that people will think Maddie is actually my kid and my parents pretend she’s theirs because they’re super Catholic or something. This is probably because everyone is always so incredulous to discover our age difference. “That’s your sister?” they ask, like in 2011 they’re still incapable of comprehending divorce or remarriage or blended families.
But really I just feel lucky: lucky to be 23 and to have a sister young enough, sweet and innocent and celestial enough, to try to catch the moon.