Apologies
By: Ariana Aboulafia
There is nothing that I could say that has not already been said.
It is becoming a disturbing tradition for me to write an article when major terrorist attacks occur. I wrote something after Elliot Rodger killed six people in Santa Barbara, California. I wrote something after the suicide bomber attacks in a major sports stadium and concert hall in Paris, France. I wrote something after a gunman opened fire at a gay bar in Orlando, Florida.
So many words. I don’t know why I’m still writing, or trying to.
What else can I possibly say?
I have written about misogyny, and gun control, and Islamophobia. I have written about fear, and sorrow, and pride. I have written out of sadness, and resignation, and always at least a little bit of hope. Today, I am not sure that I still have hope. Today, I write because it is all I know how to do, not because I think that it will actually make any difference. Today, I am speaking with no voice, running in place, banging my head against a wall, praying only to myself because I don’t know anymore if there is a God who listens to the likes of me.
I am not sure if anyone listens to me, or to each other, anymore, and I am not sure what we would hear if we did.
Today I watched the news on mute, because I didn’t want to hear the anchors say the same things over and over and over again. Seeing it was just as bad, anyway.
While I was watching/trying not to watch/watching the coverage of the terrorist attacks at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England, I saw that the perpetrator of the attack was twenty-two years old.
I am twenty-two years old, and Ariana Grande is twenty-three years old. In college, sometimes, coworkers would jokingly call me “Ariana Pequena.” Big, small.
Today, I feel so, so small.
Today, all that I can think about is how it can possibly be that someone can live on this same Earth for the same period of time that I have and think, somehow, that it was acceptable for him to do what he did to other people.
All I can think about is the last concert that I went to, and the first concert that I went to.
My first concert was Fall Out Boy, at the height of their popularity. They opened with “Sugar, We’re Going Down.” I was at the show with my best friend, and my father, who could barely stand the music but sat through the show with me anyway. It was at Madison Square Garden, in 2007. It was ten years ago, and six years after 9/11. Was I a target, then, without even knowing it? Am I a target, now, without even knowing it?
Did the girls and young women in Manchester know that they were targets? Did their mothers and fathers know, or did they think that the worst thing that was going to happen to them that night would be hearing a few songs that they didn’t like?
The last concert that I went to was John Legend. It was two weeks ago, two weeks before the attacks in Manchester and more than fifteen years after 9/11, and it was in the American Airlines Arena in downtown Miami. He played one of my favorite songs, “Love Me Now,” and his wife was in the audience. So was mine. Were we targets, then? Should we have thought that we were? Should we have known better than to put ourselves at risk that way?
Are we always, just by living, now, at risk somehow?
After a man opened fire at a gay bar in Orlando and killed 49 people last year, I remembered that living as an openly, outwardly gay woman means putting myself at risk all the time. Last year, I remembered that showing my support for this community, for my community, is an act of political defiance. I remembered that pride parades and festivals were not merely opportunities to wear rainbows and take bright photographs; I remembered that each time I attended one of these events, I was telling everyone that it was more important to be out than it was to be safe. In a way, remembering this felt okay — the history of pride, gay history itself, has deep roots in violence, in fear. Acknowledging this, and rising up anyway, is just as much a part of being gay as loving the same sex. Or at least, it is to me.
To be gay is to be a fighter, to battle bigotry with love. I remember that, always, now. I accept it.
But, how can I accept this?
How can I accept that, recently, it feels as if just being a person means also being a fighter?
How can I accept the fact that an entire arena full of girls and young women, some of them in elementary school, still just babies, have had their worlds shattered, their lives broken or even ended, just for having the gall to go to a concert? How can I accept that going to a concert, now, is also an act of defiance, a symbol that says that listening to live music is more important than being safe? Do I even believe that listening to music is more important than being safe?
Live music has changed me, to be sure. The experience of standing in a room with people who all like the same music as you, who know all the same words that you know and want to sing them with you. I’ve been to concerts with gay people and straight people, with black, white, and Asian people, in New York City and Connecticut and Los Angeles and Miami. At concerts, I have been able to dance and sing without abandon, I have found a community of people who were comfortable with me before I was comfortable with myself. After Trump was elected, I went to a Tegan & Sara concert in Fort Lauderdale, and was surrounded by people wearing safety pins on their hats and lapels. The first time my wife and I kissed outside of her tiny, pink dorm room was after a Sara Bareilles concert, in the full-moon light of a sidewalk on our college campus, high on her music and bravery. The first time my wife and I held hands in public was at an Ed Sheeran concert, before we had even started dating, when we were still trying to figure out who we were, and what we were. Ed Sheeran wore a pirate suit throughout that entire concert, because it was his birthday.
He was twenty-two years old on that day. Twenty-two people died in the Manchester bombing.
Today, I’m still twenty-two, and I still don’t know if I value concerts more than I value my life, and I don’t know if I really want to live a life without concerts, without music and community and raucous sing-a-longs, but I do know that I resent having to think about this, having to make these decisions. I resent the people who refuse to acknowledge that so many of us do have to think about these things and make these decisions on a daily basis; I resent the people who call members of my generation who campaign for safe spaces “coddled,” or “snowflakes,” because while it is true that we did not storm the beaches of Normandy or march with Dr. King, we are the only generation who has been told over and over and over again that there is no such thing as a place that we can go to without being afraid that we are going to be killed. We are the only generation who knows the taste of fear better than the taste of our lovers, the only one that looks over our shoulders when we walk into movie theaters, sporting events, airplanes or concerts or clubs. Our elders wonder why we do not wish to have children, and perhaps it is because we do not wish to bring people into this world that we see is so fragmented. Our elders mock us for wanting “safe spaces,” but perhaps the reason that we are so attached to the idea of creating these places is because we have spent our entire childhoods watching these places, the ones that we thought were safe, being destroyed, then rebuilt, then destroyed again.
We are not millennials, we are not Generation Y or even Z, we are Generation 9/11, and not a single one of us has ever been the same since that day, when we kissed our parents goodbye and watched them go to work and some of them never came back.
I thought my father was not coming back.
I resent any person that feels entitled to invade the safe spaces that we have so painstakingly built, the places where we kiss and hug and sing and dance, and destroy them. When these people — people, I have to keep telling myself, they are people, they are not losers they are not monsters they are just people — shoot us in our bars or blow us up at our concerts, they appropriate our vulnerability and steal our memories.
They take some of our humanity from us.
Humanity, today, seems to be such a strange thing to me, such a nebulous concept. How, at once, can we have the capacity to do such good and such evil? How can the person who murdered twenty-two people have so much in common, genetically and scientifically and in terms of age and physical appearance, with all of the rest of us? How can someone who kills one person for every year that he has been alive without guilt or sorrow possibly belong to the same species as Ariana Grande, who tweeted an apology, who blamed herself for gathering all of the victims in one place and putting them in harm’s way?
The answer is, in all likelihood, an uncomfortable one that is not exactly original — that deep within us, within all people (he is not a loser, he is not a monster, he is just a person, just just just a person) lies an equal potential to do incredible good and incredible evil, and it is only fate or fortune, will or luck that separates you or me from him or her. We all like to say that we would never do something so horrible, so horrifying, we couldn’t, we wouldn’t.
We could. We would. We do. He did.
Someone else will.
They will, at a bar or a club, in a train station or at a hockey game, and when they do, I’ll probably write about it again, because this is my way of trying to swallow these stones, of trying to accept all of these things that I know are unacceptable.
For the first few times, I think it worked. But, I don’t think it works anymore.
There is nothing that I can say anymore that has not already been said, by me and so many others — there is nothing sadder, it seems, than a writer who has run out of things to say, than someone who clacks at a keyboard for eight hours a day being unable to find the words to help herself, much less help anyone else, to swallow this particular stone.
I think today, my insight has been clouded in a fog of what-ifs. I think today, I have tried to write something, and I think today that I have failed, but that I’ll publish it anyway.
I think, today, that I am sad, and heartbroken, and sorry like Ariana Grande, sorry without having anything to be sorry for, but sorry is all I have left to give and so sorry is what you, whichever reader is still with me, will get.
I am sorry for my ramblings, for my lack of perception. I am sorry that you and I live in a world where events like this leave us numb instead of outraged, where the word “safe” refers to a space or a pin and never an actual feeling. I am sorry that you and I live in a world where every place is dangerous. I am sorry that you and I will not do anything to change it, I don’t think, nor will we even try, because we just see it all as being too far gone, too broken to try and rebuild from the ground up.
Tomorrow, I may feel differently. Tomorrow, you and I may join together, rise up and defeat all those who seek out happiness and goodness and turn it black with hate. But, tonight, I will not do that, and I don’t think you will, either. Tonight, I think we have given up — and for that, more than anything else, I am just so, so sorry.
