Motherfucker Fucking Fuck Fuck Fuck

Me, aged 12 or so, shooting skeet.

Someone put this bow in her hair.

Whenever a bunch of people in America get blown away by some over-armed suicidal fucktard, I'm usually pretty jaded about it. Meh, right? It's sad. Lots of people screech lots of things and nothing changes and the next one happens.

Seriously?

It's just something that happens when you live in America. People go postal. Everyone's surprised, or pretends to be. The gun lobby assures us it's people, not guns. The anti-gun people, who I'm pretty sure don't have a lobby anyone gives a shit about, hew uselessly into the air. Even though guns are bad and everything, there are civil rights afoot here and no one really wants to get into the legalities of messing with certain things.

They believed in her.

Goodness knows I don't.

And that makes it all okay.

But what the fuck fucking fuck motherfucker. Seriously?

Someone tied this scarf for her.

Bullied teens and Columbine. I get it. It went quite a lot farther than my personal teen revenge fantasies, but I know how it feels to feel that way and I'm fucking glad there was no Marilyn Manson when I was fourteen because that still makes my suicidal trigger finger deliciously itchy. And actually, I used to envision highly personalized deaths for my tormentors. Broken neck while playing flag football and no one notices till the bell rings. I carry the limp white-faced body back to the classroom. Smashed by an elevator-- worst fucking death ever, looking up and knowing what's going to happen! Run over by the school bus while everyone laughs till they realize it's for real. Falling out of windows. Heads smashed like grapes.

His eyes are the same color as LE's

But fucking hell.

Mental illness. I get it. I was talking to my dad about this yesterday, about how mental illness in the US is different from some other places not only because of the highly politicized "There's no help!" which is true, but also because most Americans, when they see something weird going on next door that doesn't involve a little kid, they butt the fuck out. Maybe it's because that's the polite thing to do. Maybe it's the fear of the inconvenience of a deposition. No one wants to be a busybody. It's not that it's wrong. It's just what we do. I daresay all the other individualism is well worth it.

It's not her fake smile.

But here, you can be sure everyone around you butts the fuck in whether you want it or not. Everyone knows your business. Hardly anyone is alone, ever, no matter how desperately they want to be. When we moved to Sarıyer, I was like, "Ooh, woods! We can go walk in the woods!" and BE was all, "What, you want to get raped?" And he was right. The woods are where guys go for a private, or not-so-private wank. An hour walk through Yıldız Park several year back yielded no fewer than three wankers. The woods along the street to ours are not free of wankers. I've even seen guys there for group wanks. They usually listen to Arabesque while they're doing it. It's one of many reasons I'm not a fan of Arabesque.

Everyone knows who she takes after.

But seriously, what the fuck else are you going to do? At least those guys aren't alone. Not alone alone, I mean. Not usually. When someone here decides to take out more than a spouse, and maybe some kids in the accompanying Hollis Brown-style desperation and despondency, he or she is usually is usually a terrorist (a for-real terrorist, not the made-up kind) and is dealt with in an entirely other way.

My uncle is mentally ill. He was institutionalized for awhile. He doesn't live geographically close to anyone in the family, but the family are seeing more and more of him. He also has a doctor he sees regularly. The doctor communicates with the family as much as is legally allowed.

No one in the world like her.

There used to be a cop who looked after him when the neighbors called in his crazy (he tended to threaten kids for being noisy). My uncle used to be aggressive and mean. He still talks incessantly. He's lonely but isn't exactly socially inviting, though I suppose he tries, in his way.

The cop retired. Between the family and the doctors and the cop, my uncle never hurt himself or anyone else. He never went to prison. It's a mixture of privilege and good luck and good fortune. Most Americans with mental illness aren't so lucky. Most people like my uncle would be in jail by the time they were his age, or they would be dead. Without all that support, however hard it was to give, there's a good chance my uncle would have taken out at least a few others with himself.

BE's uncle is mentally ill. He was institutionalized after he stabbed a guy 20 or so years ago. He lives in Fatih, and I guess a bunch of guys decided to gang up on him for smoking on the street during Ramazan. He got scared.

He would have been handsome.

Public health entitles him to medical care. After he got out of the hospital, he started letting the family look after him. He lives in an apartment, and there are some people in the building who take care of him, making sure he's fed and relatively clean. He looks after their kids sometimes. Unlike my uncle, BE's uncle loves kids. People trust him with their kids even though he's nuts by all other accounts.

All I want for Christmas is... fuck.

Every couple of weeks, BE or his parents go to Fatih to make sure he has everything he needs. Then they go around the neighborhood paying the barber, the bakkal, and whatever other shops the uncle goes to and runs up a tab. They make sure everything is okay. They find the uncle wandering the streets somewhere and give him as much affection as he'll accept. They'll have some tea with him. BE's uncle is painfully shy.

Not that mental health care in Turkey is so super stellar. It's just that I found this parallel in the care of our uncles that took the voluntary involvement of lots of people. If anything went wrong with either of our uncles, several people would be on the case and making phone calls.

But I digress. You know why? Because I can't stop thinking about it.

He's such a little guy.

A guy with a huge gun, and maybe some others strapped to his sides, explodes into a room full of kids LE's age. They're doing some kid classroom thing, maybe having Circle Time on the floor, maybe seated at little tables doing something. A teacher is in one of those tiny kid-classroom chairs making it seem okay to sit in one of those. Maybe they're all lined up taking altogether too long to wash the paint off their hands.

Because that's what kids do.

There's that smell of kid classrooms. They all turn and look. Is it something fun? A police officer maybe? A superhero? Because that's the kind of shit kids think. Maybe they had a chance to notice there was something not right about the man and some of them turned to look at their teacher.

Because that's another thing kids do. They look.

Everyone mentioned her eyes.

And then one kid's head exploded. Maybe another kid's tummy. A little shoulder. A chubby little leg. It's not all right. Some of them cry and get exploded. At this point, either the teacher is exploded, too, or she's doing something that tells the kids it's definitely not all right.

When kids cry for real, for hurt or terrified real, it's silent at first. Their lips tremble, and they go red, but no sound comes out till they take a breath. When a kid cries loudly and immediately, you know there's no need to rush. I keep wondering how many of them had a chance to do a cry that makes a sound.

He wanted to make people happy.

For sure there are Christmas decorations around the room. Some store-bought ones that appeared by magic after Thanksgiving break, and the Picasso-esque glue-glitter-handprint ones the kids made. Also star charts and some other educational stuff.

Kids have little hands and little arms and little chests you can feel the bones through. They have flattish noses and lips that stick out on top and these funny little voices that never shut up.

Fuck.

Some guy walked into a room of that, the smell, the motion, the voices, and started shooting. I'm sure there was all kinds of cinema-ish gore he wasn't quite expecting. The best thing I can hope for him is that he wasn't thinking anything.

He's putting on a brave face.

I called LE at his grandmother's the morning after I heard, just to hear his little voice on the phone. He was pissed off at me for interrupting whatever he was doing, but also he told me how he'd made a cake and Babaanne had made aşure. Then he told me some stuff about superheroes that was in no way related to the questions I'd asked him.

Me, aged 25 or so. That's a double-barreled shotgun with a pistol grip.

And when he came home, I couldn't leave him alone. I even still pat his perky little butt because I know nothing is sexualized for him yet. I recently kicked him out of the so called co-sleeping bed into the guest bed, but he still buries his face into my boob to sleep after his story. He still kind of thinks the boobs are his. One day, he'll realize it's an off-limits part of me but I bet he'll still miss it.

I sometimes think how lucky and blessed he is, how lucky and blessed we are.

A harrowing thing I once heard is that wounded soldiers on the battlefield call for their mothers, more than water or help or ouch.

Their faces are so soft.

LE even was annoying me yesterday, between getting grabbed for cuddles and neck sniffings. And then I felt guilty for being annoyed, because he was alive.

And then I felt guilty for being sad about the dead American kids when... well, you know. The shit happening to kids all over the world, even just over the border from here is too much to be borne. The other day someone posted a video on Facebook of Syrian rebels forcing an 8 year-old to execute someone. I didn't watch the video. The still was enough. Aren't the rebels supposed to be the "good guys?"

Maybe it was real and maybe it wasn't. It doesn't matter. Even if it wasn't a real video, we all know shit like that still happens to kids.

Her smile reminded them of someone else's.

Kids are people who wonder incessantly if street cats are boys or girls. They dance when you're not looking.



Last night I was talking to my dad, who isn't dealing with this any better than I am. He says he been obsessed with the details of it all on the news. I said I'm blissfully unaware of the details because I don't watch the news.

He said, "One little girl was shot six times."

I said, "Fuck."

He said, "All of the kids were shot at least twice."

I said, "That's another detail I didn't want to know."

She was going to be someone.

But I get why he had to say it. Same reason I had to say it just now. Because how the fuck else do you get that out of your head otherwise?

Insert comma here. Format photo there. The mechanics of this thing are shameful.

I've never been one of these people to bang on about about gun control and peace. You know why? Because why bother? Fucking duh, yeah? Don't give guns to psychopaths. Don't make stupid ass fucking wars where you send other people's kids to get killed. It's just so obvious to me, I never saw a reason to bother bitching about it after I was 16 or so.

Didn't have a chance to be the someone she was gonna be.

Some things will never change, no matter how hard we believe.

Here's one thing I always tell my kid: Mamas love their babies no matter what. Even when they're naughty. Even when they're stinky. Even when they're all grown up and hairy and don't care about their mamas so much anymore.

It's easy to blame the mama.

I know I've added "Even when they're psychopaths" in there once or twice. "Even if they do the baddest thing you could ever think of."

It's a good lesson. I have to remember it.