Science! and progress

I woke this morning to Science! the gerbil dragging herself across the first level of their habitat. And because I have learned to hold them but am not yet brave enough to pick them up, I called for Mary, and that’s how Science! died: in Mary’s hands.

She was small and silky. One of the most delicate animals I have ever held.

But what I want to talk about is different from grief. I want to talk about the time I returned to Hawaii, after years of absence, and sat across from my first girlfriend, the great love of my adolescence, and listened to her rail against marriage equality. “I just don’t think those people should have kids.”

Those people.

Have you ever been burned? Burned so badly that you hear your skin before you feel it? My reaction wasn’t like that at all. My reaction was so immediately painful that I cried out. My eyes filled with tears and all I could say was, “Those people?” in the smallest whisper.

This woman I had dated for years. This woman I had loved when I was still a girl and for years afterward in the ferocious way that seems to raze in every direction. Was this that girl, I wondered. Was this her? Had she always felt this way about us and people like us? Those people?

Who were those people? And how were we different?

And all at once, in the most painful and conclusive way possible, I was free of her. I was free of the guilt and the shame and the closet. I was free of my own affection for her. My sore heart had filled with pity and there was no room for anything else.

Those people. Those marvelous people.

This morning a gerbil died. This week Hawaii debated marriage equality in that mean-spirited and hopeful way that we have come to expect in marriage equality debates. Ignorance masquerading as thoughtfulness. Those people. They already have civil unions. Now they’re just being greedy.

I can’t mourn for that failure of compassion. I just don’t have it in me. The world is already teeming with actual tragedy. Suffering and poverty. Moral failing. That is all it is. A moral failing. A refusal to acknowledge and embrace the humanity of our neighbors.

At 38, I understand that I can’t assign myself grief topics. I only have 40% for typhoon victims, the rest needs to go to children living in poverty. Our centers don’t work that way. We can give them targets, but they’ll be overcome with sorrow unexpectedly. Like that man who rides around with his 3-legged dog in his lap. Every time I see him I am overcome with love.

I just can’t help it.

And I won’t waste it either. We know you. We know you and are sorry. None of us has so much time she should squander her affection on unkind fucks.