Why I Keep Thinking About It.

First of all, this and this.


We like to think we leave an imprint on the places we inhabit, the same way they leave an imprint on us. My initial reaction on hearing the news was an irrational notion that the imprint we left wasn’t strong enough, because we were very happy there. How could it be that the house where we created, nurtured, and welcomed a new life—this life that’s now the central focus of my own—isn’t somehow forever protected by an invisible amulet of good intent?

It is somehow, nonsensically, humbling that the ghost of Eva’s diapered behind wriggling away in glee down the upstairs hall…the nightly nursing sessions in the rocker in her bedroom…the meals in a kitchen suffused by sun and NPR and too many piles of papers warded off exactly nothing. We left and took our vapors with us; no shadows lingered to somehow bless the place in absentia. Conversely, however, I sometimes come out of sleep disoriented in the bedroom of our new house, “seeing” our old bedroom around me until I wake up enough to realize that that door I can see is the closet door, not the bedroom door, and it’s an entirely different streetlamp lighting the room.

I wish we could somehow go back and walk through and erase it, and I wish I could somehow comfort the people with whom, in a way, we share that space. But one of them-- the perpetrator-- is now brain dead, and another-- his girlfriend-- is distraught, and yet a third-- the victim-- most certainly wishes she had never set foot inside the house at all. It was the place she was attacked.

And yet, it will always be the very place where we became a family.

It's hard to reconcile.