Fuck all this

If you drive the streets of Berkeley early on a Friday or Saturday morning you'll see 'NO WAR' signs in every fourth or fifth window. There are bumper stickers promoting green this and that and condemning TV and violence. There are hippies everywhere. Stinky begging ones whose moms beg them to go back to college, and clean secretly wealthy ones who only wear Indian cotton and pay $9.99 a pound for organic kiwi fruit. Berkeley is a place of the people. It is a place where you learn to believe in good things, like peace and peaches without pesticides. All these good things didn't help my cousin Friday. All these good things didn't do shit for her as some fuckhead stuck a gun to her head and raped her on her way to work.

Fuck. I just don't know what I want to say here but I am so fucking tired and sad and angry I don't know what to do. This is such a selfish thing to say, but I feel a bit like it happened to me, not her. She is my closest girl-cousin, we are two of 18 first cousins and we grew up seven blocks from eachother. She is as close as I have to a sister and we haven't kept in touch nearly as well as we should have for the past decade. Two days before it happened I spoke with her mom about this, and about my grandma's funeral. One day before it happened was her 30th birthday. My baby cousin turned 30. I didn't call her. My mom did and my dad sang her some silly song.

When they got the call Friday morning they immediately called me. We all started packing. We all went down there even though we couldn't do anything to help, to change things. There were strings of phone calls. Cousins to aunts to uncles to sisters to sons and daughters. Grief was channeled, it has nowhere to go.

These past two days I've been writing in my head. I'm not sure why, but it helps me. My cousin and her boyfriend don't have a car - that's why she was out walking at 7am. Another cousin is giving them a car. My uncle didn't show up, my Aunt said when she called to tell him there was a choking sound and eventually she had to hang up. My youngest auntie, my cousins mom, sobbed when she told us about the call she received from her daughter. How she didn't know who it was at first, because it was a small child's voice on the line. How she only heard the word 'attack' and blew every red light in Berkeley to get there. How the police mentioned a medical exam when she got there, and the look on her daughter's face when she nodded, she was raped. My auntie said 'this four-year old face looked up at me' and it broke me. It fucking broke everyone.

My father's family is far, far from perfect. But they show up and I'm so proud of that. We all ate Chinese food that night, after my cousin spent the day in the hospital and with the police. And now we are all thinking of her. Wishing to rewind time. Trying hard to hurt a little of the pain for her.

I drove by our grandma's old house. The one our parents grew up in. I looked at the cracked cement stairs and imagined walking up them at 5, 6, 7. I imagined my sweet cousin,s fat little legs, the back of her chubby knees and lacy party dresses. God damn all this.

Here's the truth. I miss my grandma terribly, but I would give up a decade of the time I had with her to take this one back. I can't think of anything else to say. I just want to crawl in my bed forever.