Abstract Acacias

I don't know what it is about bad things happening. You (or at least I) never quite believe that it's real, whether you're there or not. The panic that you might feel later, or that you might equally feel in the abstract face of the possibility of disaster, is, initially, just a sense that there's this really terrible grief that you should be feeling. What it really is? Just confusion, the sensation that you've just fallen off the cliff-edge of utter unreality. So it was like that tonight when Michele got off the phone and said that Stephanie had been robbed, and sounded like she was about to laugh, and then later Mont asked how she could be so casual about the whole thing. But I don't think she was, I just didn't say so. Because it was like that two years ago (is it that long ago now?) when Abbie put her hand through the glass in the door, and we heard the shatter, heard the shouting continue straight on without pause -- no screaming, though, no crying -- and then later we saw the blood spattered on the pavement, saw the jagged black hole where the glass should be, and I couldn't walk by there without thinking about it for weeks, even though I passed there every day to get to Rachel's place. Unless I walked on the other side of the street, when I didn't have to see the little dark drops that eventually turned black and one day disappeared, so that a couple of months later I suddenly remembered, and looked down, and they weren't there. (It was easier once the door wasn't boarded up any more, when there were no obvious reminders unless I happened to be looking at my feet, or absently thought oh, that's Abbie's room I'm passing.) And it was like when Holly died. But it wasn't like that when Anne got cancer, because I kept seeing her, saw the confusion in her eyes, was there for the endless queries as to what was causing the seizures, and I was there almost every day while she was in the hospital. That made it real. But I still don't know why my first instinct, when disaster strikes, is to smile.