Mimi, me

The Internet collapses space, and silence -- and so I know this message will appear as though no time has passed, as though I haven't reflected or mourned.



If I want there to be spaces here, I have to create them.



The worst part about death, from a distance, is the narcissism. I want to mourn; I want to spend myself on grief; I want to give myself to this process.



But in the absence of others who knew her, who understand the loss blindly, viscerally, as an animal understands, I fall on myself. I implode, like a dying star, insensible to the density -- as though I am immune to being crushed.



And I am. I feel immune. I sit still, lie quietly, so the pressure diffuses evenly, so it cannot catch me. I lay like Giles Corey, willing the world to add weight. I sit and listen and laugh when my silence is interrupted. I resemble someone alive.



I am absent, as though I've sent the sorrowing parts of me away. I miss them, and hate them.



My parsimonious grief is frustrating. My frustration is frustrating. I'm in shock, maybe. I'll come out of it -- maybe.



I imagine Patricia and her secret, generous heart. I imagine Marja with her arms extended wide, accepting her own grief and mine, and sadness hits me, as acute as the relief I feel imagining these women.



I cry, but only for a moment. I wonder if the tears have tracked my face, or left no trace; I wonder which I would prefer. I do not look in the mirror.



I remember Mimi laughing, a purple bandana on her head. I remember the shawl she wrapped around herself when she was cold. I remember the sound of her voice speaking Amharic.



I remember saving her seat next to me for meetings, the anxiety of preparing to refuse anyone who tried to take it. I never understood why I did this.



I put Mimi's name on the bulletin boards, with students who had excellent attendance. I never understood why I did this, either.



I copied books on CD for her. She consulted me when she had DVD players to hook up. We went out to lunch when I left. She had sha cha chicken in Chinatown. Her husband Mohammed had noodles.



I spend the first two days after I read the news, reinventing my life, reimagining -- rebooting. Everything I do is a first, because it is the first after: "Mimi will never do this again," I tell myself helplessly as I go into the bathroom, or flip on a lightswitch, or sit on the purple couch in my living room.



Mimi helped get the purple couch, on a Monday (or Wednesday or Thursday) night in February (or March?). We piled into a pick-up truck, into Mimi's small SUV, and barreled down 13th street to retrieve it. Marja said, beaming afterward, that it had been a fun adventure because we'd all pulled together.



Mimi helped get the Christmas presents from GWU for the Adopt-a-family program. I rode down with her and we giggled at office politics, at one-way streets, at students' requests.



When I leave the newspaper office Friday night, hours after hearing that Mimi has died, I understand that the world outside is different.



I will leave something in that building that I can never come back to. And when I return the next day or the next week or next month, the building will also have changed. The room in which I sat, pressed down by understanding, will be another place where Mimi is not alive.



Every place will be.



Every place is.



Maybe here, this non-place, where no atoms divide me from my friends -- where the code of one or nothing takes over for DNA -- she can exist, in some shadow form. Maybe the recitation of my memory will be more than an elegy; maybe she can live, here.



Maybe I'm grasping at straws.





Maybe I'm coming out of shock.