disjointed. and visceral gets used twice.

There are little pieces, and there are big movements and moments. And there's everything in the middle, all the stories untold, puzzles never finished. It's how we build identity, of both who we are and who we want to be. Like the way I know my mother really does care, even on some selfish level, about what happens to her grandmother, despite her assurances that she isn't upset about it. Like the way my uncle is deeply angry about what happened to his sister. Like the instances I let myself cry. There are little defining moments built into the massive movements; Tucked underneath a death, a wedding, and a tragedy are the caring, the anger, the crying.

I really need to work on that piece of non-fiction I wrote five years ago about the night my grandfather died. I was nine years old, and I didn't know him very well- he was old and too sick by the time I was old enough to want to know him. But I still sobbed and sobbed and sobbed when I heard he was going to die. I can remember looking out the window and seeing our reflections (my father was holding me as I sobbed) and seeing red – one of us was wearing it – and just crying my heart out. What does that little piece say? Today, I don't get worked up over his death, but sometimes, when I think hard enough about Bill's, I do. I never imagined a decade and half later that it would still be so visceral. William Francis. Born 1 Feb 1945. He died of a heart attack in the summer of 1995. That death, the death of an uncle that I considered my favourite person in the world, hurt. I didn't cry when I was told. I didn't cry until the funeral, and even then, I did it without provocation, when the priest was giving a prayer.

Those are the little moments.

I cry at death, and at senseless tragedy. I consider the most defining moment for my generation to be Columbine and not, as many wish every generation needing a moment would have, the 9/11 attacks. Columbine was guns at schools and we were all kids. We were so little. Perhaps this is clouded by what came after, of the memorial service my school held for the victims. Everyone then knew I wrote poetry, and I think they all expected me to write something that would be picked for this. Columbine, friend of mine. I didn't write it, but it was my poem, and the poem of my classmates, and the children across the country; it was our mantra, it threaded us together into one group. Unified, but only we could belong to that unity. We were all shocked and mourning, and Columbine belonged to all of us. 9/11 was the Pentagon, and fields, and the twin towers. It was away from us, on the East coast. It was visceral, yes, but it wasn't the slaughter of us, by us. It wasn't kids killing kids, it was a collective across the country, it belonged to the entire nation, and thus could never define us.

Four little words. A big moment full of little moments. Pieces of character we only reveal when we think no-one's watching. It's better than the lies we tell ourselves when we think no-one is watching.