The Feeling at the Bottom of Everything
Just to totally date myself, I graduated high school in 1999, in the same school district as Columbine, Colorado. In fact, I'd been to Columbine earlier in the semester for a choir competition. Pre mass shooting we were all sort of blindly, but gleefully, trudging our way toward graduation, "senioritis" and all that. Life is small when you're 17. It's your friends, your school, your weekend, your lame parents, etc. You hate school but you go anyway. Or you skip, like I did, and take meandering car rides with friends to coffee shops where you can smoke cigarettes inside. You shop for prom. You read Milan Kundera and feel like the first person who ever did. All this went on after the shootings too, only now with police officers at every major event instead of a few bemused chaperones. But the whole end of high school post Columbine, the beginning of our adult freedom ritual, acquired a paper maché quality. Just a short drive away, in a school that could have easily been ours, kids just like us had been murdered. Murdered. By two of their classmates. It felt unfathomable. Graduation was not even two months away! We kept repeating that bit about graduation, how it was so close, how those two kids with guns almost escaped their old lives for new ones, but chose instead to stay stunted, locked in place. A couple of blood soaked Peter Pans.
I mean. The grief was real. Schools closed. Bombs were searched for. Vigils held. Teachers wept. I even got up and spoke at a vigil, some half baked ideas about Buddhist philosophy I'd recently uncovered at the library. We had numerous assemblies to talk about how we as a community could get through this/move past it/prevent it. The senior class sat on folding chairs in the center of the gym, below the pulpit, with the other grades up on the surrounding bleachers as if to say: class of '99, here's your legacy. A veil had been drawn between the 'fun' of graduating high school and where we now sat. I drove down to Columbine one afternoon and walked the hill above the school, muddy with thousands of footprints, all doing exactly what I was doing, in the spirit of utter uselessness, going to lay flowers at the foot of the 15 wooden crosses erected there for the victims and two shooters. The shooters crosses, their faces splashed across every newspaper, every detail about them scoured for a clue as to why they would do such a thing, were covered over and over again with the same words scrawled in bic pen: 'I forgive you'.
I've carried the black flag of Columbine with me ever since. Carried it as I misused my twenties, got married and divorced, went back to school, moved to Europe. It seemed to me, as a teenager, that the Columbine massacre was so horrible that nothing that horrible could happen again. Surely, collectively, we had learned some kind of lesson from this. But what I've come to realize, of course, is that Columbine is only one black flag in a fucking black flag factory. I sometimes think about WWII with a kind of sudden horror, like oh shit that really happened, and it's easier living in Europe, because my city was bombed during WWII into complete nothingness, something it is much easier to detach from in America. Though America has plenty of horror of its own. What I'm trying to say here is that I try not to be too arrogant like, oh this time is the worst time in all of history. I try to think that people have always felt this way and life has carried on regardless.
But then that feels like its own kind of arrogance, because things are pretty fucked right now. There's some general global horror going on, in terms of climate change and environmental destruction, which humans have never faced before and clearly are dealing with in a very 'la la la cognitive dissonance la la la' type of way. And we're also a global "community" and with the internet we can hear about every atrocity that happens across the face of the earth in an instant, complete with a list of which persons from which nations have died, their ages, hobbies, Facebook page and bereaved loved ones. 2016 seemed to have been especially trigger happy, disaster happy, upheaval happy. If there's a boiling point, I believe we are reaching it. There is clearly, obviously, a deep current of rage running across the world and, as a fun bonus, people very willing to exploit it. We are drowning in exposes of each mass shooter, each terrorist, each politician, but we're still just as clueless as we were looking at the acne scarred faces of Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris. The general vibe I'm catching off social media these days is not panic per se, but a weirdly resigned and depressed, 'oh shit, what's next'. My sister says we've entered an age of no safe spaces, where we have to accept that anything can happen to us at any time. Watching fireworks with our family. At the airport. At work. Peacefully protesting. Going to the movies. Going to school. I have to wonder what that does to the collective psyche. I guess we're going to find out.
Kim Kardashian, after one of the awful things that's happened this year, tweeted "God, the world needs you". I sat there quietly after I read her tweet, thinking of the black emptiness of space, where God could possibly be located, and the colossal size of our sun, about one million earths. I thought about where prayers go, where less than prayers go, hashtags of prayers, in a 24 hour news cycle swallowing and swallowing its own tail while we scramble around shoving different devices in front of our faces for distraction. I thought of the strange flickering light patterns of star KIC 8462852, a trillion miles away, which some people theorize could be caused by an alien megastructure. I thought of another cosmic theory, which is that the reason we haven't found intelligent life yet in the universe is that most of the stars are still too young, their light too strong, so eventually there will be more intelligent life but we are just the first. We are just the first. We are just the first.
I saw a photo of sperm whales from Atlas Obscura today. Someone posted it with the caption, "stop what you're doing and check out these whales!!!!". I am a sucker for this kind of thing. The article itself was very joyful. This is a happy whale family. No heartstrings meant to be pulled, but I found myself crying anyway. Random nature things often make me cry. Fireflies did it last summer. Birds are common culprits. Skies at the edge of dusk. I touch something that I think of as the feeling at the bottom of everything. The feeling at the bottom of everything is a special type of sadness, sadness because nature is so beautiful and so mysterious and everything dies and no one knows why. No one even knows why some of us are conscious to this miracle and other species only seem to dwell within it, or maybe they are aware, I don't know, I can't touch the vastness of that. The vastness between me and these whales. But at the same time, here we all are, a part of this tiny thing that makes us so close we might as well share a body. It’s too crazy. Too much. Another side of the sadness at the bottom of everything, is the feeling that we're missing it. Not in a FOMO way. Like humanity is missing it. Like it's running out of our fingers at a million miles an hour, and that soon—so soon—it will be gone like it never even existed. It will be gone and we won't even know the hour it left. And once it is gone, something very crucial to us, a sliver of light inside us, will be gone too. And there won't be any getting it back.
My mom, a child of the sixties, said to me once, "when I was a teenager, I remember thinking, we can really do this, we can stop racism, we can treat each other with kindness, now I know that will never be true." We were in Arizona at the time, driving down a lightless street, heaven inky black above our heads. "No," I said to her, "it can be true." I was trying to tell her, I still believe in something better. I still believe we can do better. I wanted to pull her back from that pessimistic place, though I can't say why I was trying to convince a woman in her sixties who has lived through plenty of atrocities of her own, it doesn't make a lot of rational sense. I know what I've seen since Columbine put that first black flag in my hands, and in dark moments, that fear, that sense of cosmic nothingness, that feeling like we're all just drones in an overturned ant hill, often trumps hope. Maybe I was saying to my mom, please still believe, simply because sometimes I want so badly for someone to say it to me.
I mean. The grief was real. Schools closed. Bombs were searched for. Vigils held. Teachers wept. I even got up and spoke at a vigil, some half baked ideas about Buddhist philosophy I'd recently uncovered at the library. We had numerous assemblies to talk about how we as a community could get through this/move past it/prevent it. The senior class sat on folding chairs in the center of the gym, below the pulpit, with the other grades up on the surrounding bleachers as if to say: class of '99, here's your legacy. A veil had been drawn between the 'fun' of graduating high school and where we now sat. I drove down to Columbine one afternoon and walked the hill above the school, muddy with thousands of footprints, all doing exactly what I was doing, in the spirit of utter uselessness, going to lay flowers at the foot of the 15 wooden crosses erected there for the victims and two shooters. The shooters crosses, their faces splashed across every newspaper, every detail about them scoured for a clue as to why they would do such a thing, were covered over and over again with the same words scrawled in bic pen: 'I forgive you'.
I've carried the black flag of Columbine with me ever since. Carried it as I misused my twenties, got married and divorced, went back to school, moved to Europe. It seemed to me, as a teenager, that the Columbine massacre was so horrible that nothing that horrible could happen again. Surely, collectively, we had learned some kind of lesson from this. But what I've come to realize, of course, is that Columbine is only one black flag in a fucking black flag factory. I sometimes think about WWII with a kind of sudden horror, like oh shit that really happened, and it's easier living in Europe, because my city was bombed during WWII into complete nothingness, something it is much easier to detach from in America. Though America has plenty of horror of its own. What I'm trying to say here is that I try not to be too arrogant like, oh this time is the worst time in all of history. I try to think that people have always felt this way and life has carried on regardless.
But then that feels like its own kind of arrogance, because things are pretty fucked right now. There's some general global horror going on, in terms of climate change and environmental destruction, which humans have never faced before and clearly are dealing with in a very 'la la la cognitive dissonance la la la' type of way. And we're also a global "community" and with the internet we can hear about every atrocity that happens across the face of the earth in an instant, complete with a list of which persons from which nations have died, their ages, hobbies, Facebook page and bereaved loved ones. 2016 seemed to have been especially trigger happy, disaster happy, upheaval happy. If there's a boiling point, I believe we are reaching it. There is clearly, obviously, a deep current of rage running across the world and, as a fun bonus, people very willing to exploit it. We are drowning in exposes of each mass shooter, each terrorist, each politician, but we're still just as clueless as we were looking at the acne scarred faces of Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris. The general vibe I'm catching off social media these days is not panic per se, but a weirdly resigned and depressed, 'oh shit, what's next'. My sister says we've entered an age of no safe spaces, where we have to accept that anything can happen to us at any time. Watching fireworks with our family. At the airport. At work. Peacefully protesting. Going to the movies. Going to school. I have to wonder what that does to the collective psyche. I guess we're going to find out.
Kim Kardashian, after one of the awful things that's happened this year, tweeted "God, the world needs you". I sat there quietly after I read her tweet, thinking of the black emptiness of space, where God could possibly be located, and the colossal size of our sun, about one million earths. I thought about where prayers go, where less than prayers go, hashtags of prayers, in a 24 hour news cycle swallowing and swallowing its own tail while we scramble around shoving different devices in front of our faces for distraction. I thought of the strange flickering light patterns of star KIC 8462852, a trillion miles away, which some people theorize could be caused by an alien megastructure. I thought of another cosmic theory, which is that the reason we haven't found intelligent life yet in the universe is that most of the stars are still too young, their light too strong, so eventually there will be more intelligent life but we are just the first. We are just the first. We are just the first.
I saw a photo of sperm whales from Atlas Obscura today. Someone posted it with the caption, "stop what you're doing and check out these whales!!!!". I am a sucker for this kind of thing. The article itself was very joyful. This is a happy whale family. No heartstrings meant to be pulled, but I found myself crying anyway. Random nature things often make me cry. Fireflies did it last summer. Birds are common culprits. Skies at the edge of dusk. I touch something that I think of as the feeling at the bottom of everything. The feeling at the bottom of everything is a special type of sadness, sadness because nature is so beautiful and so mysterious and everything dies and no one knows why. No one even knows why some of us are conscious to this miracle and other species only seem to dwell within it, or maybe they are aware, I don't know, I can't touch the vastness of that. The vastness between me and these whales. But at the same time, here we all are, a part of this tiny thing that makes us so close we might as well share a body. It’s too crazy. Too much. Another side of the sadness at the bottom of everything, is the feeling that we're missing it. Not in a FOMO way. Like humanity is missing it. Like it's running out of our fingers at a million miles an hour, and that soon—so soon—it will be gone like it never even existed. It will be gone and we won't even know the hour it left. And once it is gone, something very crucial to us, a sliver of light inside us, will be gone too. And there won't be any getting it back.
My mom, a child of the sixties, said to me once, "when I was a teenager, I remember thinking, we can really do this, we can stop racism, we can treat each other with kindness, now I know that will never be true." We were in Arizona at the time, driving down a lightless street, heaven inky black above our heads. "No," I said to her, "it can be true." I was trying to tell her, I still believe in something better. I still believe we can do better. I wanted to pull her back from that pessimistic place, though I can't say why I was trying to convince a woman in her sixties who has lived through plenty of atrocities of her own, it doesn't make a lot of rational sense. I know what I've seen since Columbine put that first black flag in my hands, and in dark moments, that fear, that sense of cosmic nothingness, that feeling like we're all just drones in an overturned ant hill, often trumps hope. Maybe I was saying to my mom, please still believe, simply because sometimes I want so badly for someone to say it to me.
Elinor Abbott is an American writer living in South Holland. She is the author of Is This The Most Romantic Moment of My Life? a chapbook of short essays from Banango Editions. She has been published by The Wild Hunt, Human Parts, Bright Wall/ Dark Room and other publications. Find her on Twitter @little_thousand.