Not the thick fleshy layer, but the tissue in between. Sometimes I feel I am made of that membrane. I could rip apart in an instant. Because I read a story how the junta in Myanmar is standing in the way of helping their own people after the terrible cyclone that flattened their country–their own people!–and I want to scream.
Or when I read about the children lost in the earthquake in China, my heart just broke open. Yesterday I heard this story on NPR while driving to the Unreliable Narrator’s school to pick him up and bring him home, and I wept all the way there. What was unbearably sad were the snatches of Mandarin spoken by the parents that I could understand before the translator’s voice, her own voice cracking from emotion, overlapped their words.
“…so cute (hen ke ai), about ten minutes before I left for work before the earthquake happened, he called out, Mama, don’t go away (bu yao zou le), he didn’t want me to go!”
Later: “Mama zao ni lai le” (Mama’s coming to find you!)
Other words are too hard to decipher through the parents sobs. The wails of grief transcend any language, but I am undone hearing searing expressions of sorrow in my mother tongue. The reporter tells us that the little boy was found in his grandfather’s arms with his grandmother crouched behind.
When I saw the Unreliable Narrator, he seemed surprised by how tightly I hugged him.
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