Things Keep Blending Together

It's a sign of my aging brain, perhaps, or maybe of something in the world at large. But things keep blending together.

Several months ago a Mary Gaitskill novel merged with a memoir by A.M. Holmes as I read them both, becoming some kind of hybrid in my mind.

Now I am reading Margaret Atwood's dystopian novel "The Year of the Flood," which describes a fragmentary, broken civilization of the near future.

Today I read Edwidge Danticat in the New Yorker, talking about her family in Haiti, and I can't separate the two worlds. They are too similar. It's a little unnerving.

An excerpt:

Everyone sounded eerily calm on the phone. No one was screaming. No one was crying. No one said “Why me?” or “We’re cursed.” Even as the aftershocks kept coming, they’d say, “The ground is shaking again,” as though this had become a normal occurrence. They inquired about family members outside Haiti: an elderly relative, a baby, my one-year-old daughter.

I cried and apologized. “I’m sorry I can’t be with you,” I said. “If not for the baby—”

My nearly six-foot-tall twenty-two-year-old cousin—the beauty queen we nicknamed Naomi Campbell—who says that she is hungry and has been sleeping in bushes with dead bodies nearby, stops me.

“Don’t cry,” she says. “That’s life.”

“No, it’s not life,” I say. “Or it should not be.”

“It is,” she insists. “That’s what it is. And life, like death, lasts only yon ti moman.” Only a little while.