Why Were They Only Talking About Themselves?
Hi everyone, thanks for subscribing. I don't know how I can describe what forthcoming TinyLetters are/will be but I suppose this one is part autofiction, part blog, part essay, part randomness. Enjoy (or not).
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This event has been cancelled. You cannot share this event, but you can still post.
!!! CANCELLED DUE TO 2019-nCoV !!!
Race is cancelled but still committed to training! 11.12 KM Long Hill Run!
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It's 2003. My mother calls us down from upstairs, where I am pretending to practice Hanon (who, by the way, can fuck off). My brother, lying on the carpet in the piano room, makes this funny cross-eyed face that he doesn't do anymore because it makes him look stupid. That year, the optometrist told us that he had to exercise his lazy eye in the kitchen, in the dark, daily, using printed sheets of dots and lines, otherwise he would end up with his irises permanently turned in, like they couldn't let go of each other.
My mother calls us. My name, twice, angrily. Ting ting! Where are you!
We run down the stairs in our usual dangerous way, bumping against the walls, knees almost scraping the floor, then stop as we hear my mother's soft sobs. We have two sets of staircases, one carpeted and one wooden. The shift from carpet to wood always sounds shocking, the plosive thunks descending into stomping. I stop midway down the wooden steps and peer through the slats so that my mother's face and my face are equal. She was much taller back then.
"What's wrong?" I ask. She had been crying, but it seemed she was just dried up then, fatigued, her eyelids red and white like little sunburned conch shells.
"It's your uncle Leslie," she says. "He just died."
My brother and I giggle, avoiding her eyes. It is the first time anyone close to us had died, at least someone young, someone in their prime, someone who just a few months ago had shown us around his house, let me pet his golden retriever and take photos of the perfect lotus flowers floating in his artificial pond. I know she isn't joking but at the same time, I really think she is. I feel like my head has become loose.
"Really?"
"Yes. He jumped off a building. And you're laughing about it."
I cover my mouth in horror. No we're not I say, holding the staircase bars firmly to emphasize my confidence, expecting the argument to drag on for hours as usual, as we were always doing at that stage in my life, but she seemed worn down.
"You're so rude," she just said, walking away.
Later my brother asks how where did he do it and did he leave anything. Everyone knows by now. The suicide note, the drink at the dark bar, Daffy, the depression. At the time, the circumstances surrounding his death seemed mythical, and the intense media coverage that followed a dream. I found forums and websites that seemed to know him better than us, that mourned him better than I did. People wrote poems, left flowers, made videos. I felt so guilty that I joined some random forum where the header was a black-and-white photo of him superimposed on a red rose, and asked people how they felt. At 14 years old, I therapized strangers online.
I'm so so so so sad, one girl said. I don't think I'll ever get over it.
Months later, my parents announced that we were cancelling our annual trip to Hong Kong that year because of SARS. Sometime after we took down the decorations on our first Christmas tree in London, we heard the news about Anita. My grandparents ring a lot, with updates. Everyone's on the phone but we just can't connect.
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It's 2020. I send a link to my friend about the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan. "Looks kind of intense," I say.
"It's not that big a deal," she replies, without any emojis or punctuation. "No one has died."
I reply a few more times, saying that these issues become uncontrollable when people don't pay enough attention or don't take it seriously enough. Sure no one's died yet, I say, but we should still be vigilant. She doesn't reply.
A week later, she tells me that she's cancelled all her plans, and is hibernating in her flat until she can escape to Europe. She says I should cancel my new year's plans too, uninvite friends, not go out. I can't help but feel irritated that she's panicking this much, that she allowed herself to ignore the issue until it became inflamed, and now she can't stop picking at it. She posts a new story every hour on social media, each time polishing her vocabulary into some new kind of fucked up anxiety haiku. Between her and another acquaintance who can't stop posting the most banal and unsubstantiated updates about the protests, contextualized only by their point of view as an expat living in the mid-levels, I find myself wanting to disconnect from it all. Where the fuck is your empathy? I want to say. It's not like they've outwardly expressed that they don't care about others, but it's more that they seem to only talk about themselves. I feel bitter and angry but I don't really know why.
How does the personal and public converge? How can we reconcile private and public loss? I felt the sincerity of the girl on the forum, but how could they be so sad when they hadn't even met him, when they hadn't been a part of it? Why were they only talking about themselves? Who does loss belong to? Where do I put this anger, this sadness?