Personal/Political

Last week, after four years nearly to the day, my boyfriend and I split up. We were living together in the home that we bought last year. There was almost no aspect in which our lives were not intertwined: we worked together on projects and events, gave our time to the same causes, had the same circles of intimates, hell, wore each other's clothes. I think he treated me horribly and inhumanly, with a callous and wanton cruelty that only barely covered his own fear, sadness, and ambivalence. I am sure he feels similarly about me. I am not sure that we're not still in love; I think, probably, that we are.

It's one thing to go to sleep alone after being used to have a body beside you. You can read until your eyes shut and the book falls from your hands, or you can count your breath backwards out of consciousness, or you can go to a friend's house and have one extra, soporific glass of wine with dinner. It's quite another to wake up alone, with no body beside you, with no tricks or techniques but to swing your legs over the side of the bed and walk to the bathroom through a closet still full of the detritus of your shared life. Like every other life, mine has had its share of hurts and disappointments, but I've never felt so utterly defeated, weak, and directionless, nor ever felt that the air was just too thick to breathe, nor that I might as well just stay in bed forever, until my stomach shrinks into itself and my heart shuts up in my ears. I nearly wept on the bus--the bus! I can't concentrate. I hurt palpably, as if deep water were crushing me. I feel utterly bereft, without worth or hope.

Now if this is how I feel after something so quotidian as a break-up; if I feel my frankly comfortable, untroubled life to be exploding into a thousand sorrows just because my lover and I reached an impasse that we couldn't negotiate together; if such bleakness, helplessness, and desperation as I've never felt in my life can come from something so insubstantial as having to buy new furniture or a new jacket because he's taking my favorites; if I am wracked by fear--real, true fear as I haven't felt since I was a child--about being alone for a while; then just how the fuck must it feel to be an Iraqi or an Afghani or a Palestinian? If it's bad to lose a lover in Pittsburgh, what must it be like to see your family killed, or your husband kidnapped, or your home destroyed in Baghdad?

I think this is an experiment too many of us shy away from totally, to consider the very worst hurts in our lives, the deepest gulfs of grief and despair, and to try to imagine them magnified a hundred-fold and then repeated daily, accompanied by daily humiliations and by a truer helplessness. That, you know, is why something like the Occupation of Iraq is such an unforgiveable crime--not because it violates the ethical obligations of nations, if such exist, or because it contravenes international law, or because it violates some ephemeral original spirit of America, truth, justice democracy. I am sick to death of justice and democracy. I am tired beyond words of the euphemisms that surround the treatment of war as a political phenomenon. Consider the most terrible thing that has ever happened to you and your family, and then look at a picture of a woman wailing over a husband killed by a bomb, or a man tearing his hair out over the body of his brother with a bullet in the head, and consider that for them the reoccurence of such tragedy is inevitable, and the closeness to it daily and inescapable. How must they hurt, those people caught between nations, armies, insurgencies? And how is it that I am crying on a bus for myself, and not for them?