descansen en paz

— I don’t feel like everything is just going to feel better tomorrow.
— I don’t think so.

It has been just two full days. It feels so long. Yesterday, I woke up around 9am. I was in Los Angeles with my boyfriend, who had just finished AIDS/LifeCycle, a 545-mile ride to raise funds and bring awareness to end HIV/AIDS. He was overheated. As I looked at my phone while he half-slept, I saw the news, and I started crying. I alternated between crying on him and getting up to go to the sink to get water to cool him down.

I read twenty minutes later how an arsenal of assault weapons had been found 7 miles west of us, in Santa Monica. The man who owned them had intended to bring them to where I had been getting a drink just 9 hours earlier, to kill people like me.

Over the next 380 miles driving home I cried on him. I don’t remember what I cried to as we fell asleep last night, but I know I did.

Sleeping didn’t make anything go away. I had been checking the City of Orlando’s page to see if Chris Leinonen, the son of the mother interviewed on TV, was among the names posted, or his boyfriend, Juan Guerrero. In the morning it was confirmed that they both were among those who had died. My boyfriend woke up to me crying over their picture.

I got to work at 9:23. I cried at my desk for the first time at 9:35. At 9:59 my manager saw me in the hallway, and walked toward me with a sympathetic expression. I burst into tears.

I read all your names today, every one of you whose names were in the BuzzFeed article at 3pm, I read on the grand staircase of San Francisco City Hall. I said the Mourner’s Kaddish for you. I brought flowers to the corner of 18th and Castro for you. I had a hard time choosing which bouquet to buy for you, and then I saw that the colorful one I had first been drawn to was called the Buena Vida bouquet.

Descansen en paz.

this post was originally published on my previous blog on June 14, 2016