There will be no music post today, in silent honor and respect to those lost in Air France Flight 447. The plane vanished in my backyard while I was sleeping, and I have walked around all day with a feeling of not being quite… here.
The only thing that could make losing someone in an accident any worse, is not finding them. The news today has left me agitated, uncomfortable in my skin, remembering lost things, reflecting on the futility of still wanting them, waiting for them. I have dreams sometimes of people I’ve lost as if they were still with me. And it’s never anything dramatic, usually, at least nothing that will allow itself into my waking memories — just hanging around a house or apartment, talking as if nothing had ever gone wrong, as if all that time and space between you didn’t exist. It is the ordinariness of it that leaves beads of sweat covering your body when you wake from it and remember what you can never entirely forget. And the dream repeats itself just as your loss repeats itself in the parting of anyone you’ve ever cared for since.
There is nothing I could say to any of the families effected by this. The plane went down just off the coast of where I am living, near an island, Fernando de Noronha, that is reportedly as close to paradise as anything the northeast of Brazil has to offer. I hope that, whether or not there is such a thing as a soul, they have found peace. Because I know that their families never will.