i think i need to talk about the shuttle.

i was in class. (i’m always in class when these things happen.) i am taking a computer hardware class on saturdays and i got to the lab a little bit early so i sat down at one of the computers and i opened up internet explorer, thinking to check my email before the professor arrived. and when i opened the browser, the explosion was sitting there, right there on the desktop. and i swear, i didn’t believe it.

i had recently heard about a fake cnn site that looks (apparently) just like the real thing, but has mock-up news stories, which also seem real enough. dave matthews died, the olsen twins are going to tufts, that type of thing. and looking at another shuttle gone to pieces, i, horrified, grief-stricken, searched for evidence of fraud. this couldn’t be real. not again. not like this. please, don’t let it be real. my eyes began to tear, my heart to take up space in my hands as the truth became more apparent.

seven astronauts. pieces of the shuttle columbia three feet long strewn all over texas. right after the anniversary of the challenger. i keep thinking of the columbia as the challenger. keep referring to it as the challenger. keep remembering where i was when that first shuttle went down.

i was in the first grade. we were in the lunch room, the whole y.m.c.a. academy (my elementary school at the time) assembled to watch the challenger go up. to wave to christa mcauliffe. when it exploded, i did not understand. i did not understand that it was happening right then, as i was watching it. that they did not intend for us to see an explosion. i thought, perhaps, it had been taped earlier and they wanted for all of us to see the great tragedy of it. i did not know that they did not know what would happen. we were rushed out of the cafeteria. i understood, later, watching the replays on the big television at the leapharts’ house.

i understand now. and my heart, rushing forward, disintegrates upon entry, breaks into burning metal pieces, and strews itself all over texas, tearing up houses and kicking up dust and dirt better left settled. it could have been me, had i become the astronaut i dreamed of becoming. it could have been my uncle guion, the first black astronaut, ever—were he younger. as it was, it was half a dozen people like me and like my uncle (two women, one black person, an israeli, a multicultural group), people who looked up at the stars and wanted to go there, who put their trust in the hope that we might, in the belief that we can, that we should, that home is everywhere.

to find that this machinery, this alchemy of tnt and microchips is imperfect, is, like any human being, any human thing, flawed, that the hope and the dream might not be enough to carry us safely there and back, that our hearts outstretch and overstep the limits of our means—is heartbreaking. is devastating. and even in the midst of my grief over bush’s insane war and all the lives lost, all the lives my country is responsible for destroying. even after the towers fell and even what with the prison industrial complex and the starving and the aching and aids and cancer and everything else, my grief over these seven is particular, is personal, and is deep. it is as if i know them, personally. they were so very much like me. they dreamed. they trusted. they believed . . .

i grieve, now. i hold myself, tight, knees to my chest. i look at the astronauts’ pictures. i look to the stars. i wait for the tears to turn to dust.