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.
When I was 20 and I lived in that tiny chambre de bonne with the balcony that overlooked the Luxembourg Gardens, I would often wake up to the noises of someone sobbing in the apartment next to mine. My roommate Rachel and I each heard these wails separately but didn’t bring them up to each other until we were certain we weren’t going crazy. We were young and alone in a foreign city, so fading into paranoia, hearing things in the middle of the night, was a distinct possibility. Then one night the sobbing was so thunderous and heartbreaking that Rachel peeped from her bed in the loft above mine, “Jess—are you awake? Do you hear that?”
“Yes,” I whispered back. “What is that?”
“It sounds like someone screaming, ‘Maman!’” she responded. “I’m really fucking freaked out.”
Of course she was, we both were, because the apartment next to ours was empty. No one lived there, and we knew this for sure because the door was boarded up. Still almost every night we were awoken to the sound of a male voice howling for his mother. It was deeply pained, underscored by staccato thumps on the floor and the walls. Under layers of holed blankets in the wet, obsidian night, we were terrified.
Sometimes I don’t think it’s possible to understand acute, gutting loneliness until you travel to another country. At least in your own country, where everything flows in comfortingly expected ways, even when you are lonely you aren’t always alone. You can converse with people at the grocery store or grumble harmoniously about the lateness of the Muni with fellow passengers. There is a gratefulness we forget to embrace in shared experience: it humanizes us, it grabs us from whatever it is we’re drowning in and yanks us to the surface. In a foreign country, one in which you are unfamiliar with the language and the customs and the culture, it’s easy to become unmoored, lost, disconnected from the life that steamrolls past you in a confident cloud of soaring, rolling R’s and unfiltered Pall Mall smoke. I’ve been in Rome for three days and I’ve felt bewildered every single moment. I actually kind of like it that way.
My dad and I never really had much in common, except a shared love for politics that he purposefully cultivated in me early on. When I lived at home and we’d exhausted all of our favorite current events topics, we’d almost always turn out attention to our cocker spaniel, Cocoa, whose bad behavior was a constant source of anxiety but also a welcome discussion subject. Cocoa’s antics, like his penchant for rug peeing and tearing up the mail, never ceased to amuse and connect us. We loved him, he was part of our family, even though he destroyed the hardwood floors and chewed holes into all of my underwear.
I got Cocoa for my 8th birthday. On that day, my mom showed up at school with this adorable, shaking puppy and I refused to believe he was mine. “Why are you holding Brad Smith’s dog?” I asked. “He’s not Brad Smith’s,” my mom replied, grinning. “He’s your dog.” Cocoa was so scared of everyone we had to carry him to the car. I remember he licked my face on the way to pick my sister up from daycare. My mom went in and got Alison and I sat in the car with Cocoa. My sister couldn’t believe our luck either. Didn’t my Dad say we couldn’t get a dog?
We learned later that my dad hadn’t been informed of the impulse purchase. My mother bought Cocoa in a fit of mania, without consulting him. She was blinded by her desire for love and admiration from my sister and me; she reveled in the gleeful looks that graced our faces when we first saw her holding Cocoa. I like to imagine that my dad took one look at Cocoa, so scruffy and buoyant, and completely changed his mind. In actuality it took much longer to adjust. But my dad did grow to like Cocoa, to bond with him even. He’d never admit it, though.
She will never know the grating awkwardness of parent-teacher conferences. Not because she’ll get bad grades, or because her teachers will hate her (they won’t), but because her parents will drive there together, from the house in which they live together, and when they sit down next to the teacher there will be no doubt about the fact that they are a “unified front.” There will be no “I’ll meet you in the parking lot at five minutes to seven” or “Your Dad’s going and I’m sitting this one out.” After class the next day the teacher will smile and say, “Your parents are so lovely!” instead of knitting her brow and in a low-whisper grunting, “I’m here if you ever want to talk.”
When she accomplishes something notable, the celebration won’t be a source of anxiety. There will be no fretting over whose house to host it at or whether her Stepparents will get along. There will be no awkward silence as she sits by and watches the adults in her life struggle like children with polite phrases. It won’t be about them. It will be about her.
I was 13 when those planes took the towers, crumpling them carelessly against a cruel blue sky. It was on that day I learned what fear was, and since then it’s been difficult to discern whether anxiety is physically braided into my DNA or has been cultivated by outside influences. My father is about as neurotic as they come: pale and freckly with thin, tight lips, glasses perched on the tip of his nose, a master of hand wringing and worst case scenarios. Surely his penchant for panic was passed down to me, but at 23, my anxiety now seems to surpass his. As a journalist and avid media watcher, our obsession with apocalypse isn’t just starting to annoy me; it’s starting to make me sick. Would I be as anxious as I am now if fears of apocalyptic meltdown weren’t wed to our national psyche?