New Voices:
Filling void left by Pulse proves difficult.
Before dawn, while I got dressed for a long-planned trip to Costa Rica, Omar Mateen was unleashing something like hell onto my city. Although a friend’s early text let me know that “someone got shot at Pulse,” I hurriedly continued packing after a brief, concerned pause. Occasional shootings are a sad fact of life in America, and many of us have been desensitized to them. But beyond all probability, as I was waiting in lines and checking bags, the body count was rising.
I checked the news again just before shutting my phone off for departure and was shocked. Nothing came to me for a few hours, other than to cry into the shoulder of a man I loved, seated next to me.
Near the end of the flight, for some reason, I got the feeling that I should open my window and look out. I scrunched up to my side and slid open the cover. How quickly life can draw us into horror and out of it again:
The white light that bounced up from the clouds below and hit my face and almost blinded me, but it was one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen. Because it was bright, because it was unexpected, because I was there to see it when other people were not. I remember thinking then “this is where the angels live,” but it wasn’t. It was just the beauty of my own life, sitting on an airplane. Still, I hope people who are snatched from the Earth too soon do go someplace else, and that it’s as magnificent as what peeked out at me in that lovely moment.
Some of us who’ve never been in the wrong place at the wrong time still have beginnings ahead of us. Of course, this is a time to think back on the people who no longer do. But let’s also try to remember what we know about our own time: that it is just a fleeting opportunity. It should never again take the lives of 49 friends and loved ones to remember that.
For the next few days of my trip, I tried to live as if I had been marked “50.” What other choice was there? I sat on jagged rocks beneath a frigid waterfall. I flew through the sky, with a taut metal wire suspending me above a canyon. I wandered a jungle and swam in too-dark lakes. I am not an especially brave person, and was terrified almost every moment. We can be terrified in the face of beauty and the face of evil just the same. Still, if there was a hole in my heart, I had the responsibility to fill it back up with something … would it be fear and bitterness, or would it be strength?
One night a fellow tourist, a
Parisian woman named Hélène who had lost someone in the Bataclan theater massacre a few months prior, got to talking with me. When I told her that I felt ashamed and selfish for being away from my city, she said something amazing: “In a world where you can be gunned down any moment, you had damn well better stand under a freezing waterfall if you get the chance.”
It is a constant struggle for anyone to live fearlessly. LGBT youth often learn this lesson worrying what friends will think if they come out or, worse still, if they will have a family to go home to. Maybe I learned it on that trip, with the sorrow of my hometown right behind me. All I know if that one day each one of us will indeed be marked “50.”
Until then, let’s try to see more of our own lives like we were looking through the tiny window of an airplane.
Michael Hristakopoulos of Orlando, 27, is a member of the Orlando Sentinel Editorial Advisory Board.