You know, I don’t cry very often. Except at sappy movies, but that’s sort of beside the point. Real life, in general, fails to upset me. I’m very mellow. But today reading the news stories about Columbia the tears keep starting in my eyes.
I didn’t cry about it yesterday, when I was looking at people’s away messages and followed a link to the story at cnn.com. I read the story at the BBC website, and I made my roommate put up with listening to the NPR webcast for a while. It was 2 in the afternoon, they didn’t really have much to say except they didn’t know what exactly happened and let’s interview people who used to work with NASA, rehash the Challenger disaster…. So eventually we turned it off, I struggled through some reading for International Politics about the inherent immorality of politics, but I really had a lot of trouble concentrating. Seven pages in four hours. I kept thinking about the space shuttle.
The day moved on though, and about 6:30 I went and played squash with my friend Emily and a friend of hers who was visiting us from Cornell. And I went to a concert, and I went a party, and I met a guy who was sure he’d seen me several hours earlier doing a poetry reading on Main Street somewhere. And I went to sleep, and I woke up today, had some breakfast, and after a bit decided I would just check the new stories before I did the other half of my ipol reading. And now I’ve discovered that nearly all the astronauts were married, and had children, and they were fifteen minutes from landing, and they won’t ever land now, and the investigators have found some “human remains” in Texas near the Louisiana border, and their children will never see their mothers or fathers again, they’re down to one parent and flash of light in the sky over Texas….

And so the tears run down my face and drip off my chin.

I don’t remember crying for 9/11. I don’t think I did. I called my parents in Alaska, where it was 6:30 in the morning, and told my mom she needed to turn on the radio, and when I called back later the circuits were all busy. And the next day I called my best friend in Belgium to assure her that Connecticut isn’t that close to New York, and I wasn’t there, and neither was our other friend…

9/11 was too big, too shocking… I guess I never cried because it was so unreal. Everyone wanted to think it was just a joke, special effects like a movie. Come on, we’ve seen the White House be destroyed in lots of movies… The loss of the space shuttle is so much smaller, and yet so much more real.

And somehow I have to get over it long enough to do my reading for my classes tomorrow, and do my problem set for econ….