Pain

The unimaginable. I think about the unimaginable. The things that happen so unexpectedly, so not a part of your plan, so from the movies and not real life. Some people live their entire life without experiencing the unimaginable. Some people can't escape it.

I'm reading 'Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" by Jonathan Safran Foer right now. It's a fictional story but based on the actual events of 9/11. The book tells the story of a 9 year old boy named Oskar whose father dies in one of the World Trade Centers. Oskar and his dad were extremely close and before he passed away they spent a lot of time together. His dad would put together riddle-like treasure hunts for Oskar to figure out, some of them taking him to places all around NYC. A year after 9/11 Oskar finds a key in an envelope in his dads closet sending him on a hunt to find the lock it belongs to. The book goes into detail at times about how Oskar deals with the pain of what he calls "the worst day". He lays awake in bed most nights unable to sleep and to pass the time he invents things in his mind. An excerpt from the book reads;

“In bed that night I invented a special drain that would be underneath every pillow in New York, and would connect to the reservoir. Whenever people cried themselves to sleep, the tears would all go to the same place, and in the morning the weatherman could report if the water level of the Reservoir of Tears had gone up or down, and you could know if New York was in heavy boots. And when something really terrible happened- like a nuclear bomb, or at least a biological weapons attack- an extremely loud siren would go off, telling everyone to get to Central Park to put sandbags around the reservoir.”

—	Extremely Loud, Incredibly Close

I read that a few days ago and I'm still thinking about it. There's a lot of pain underneath these words. I wouldn't think of something like this. The depth of it I get, but cannot grasp. Throughout the book Oskar speaks so proudly of his father and describes memories so vividly. As you read you can feel the pain as Oskar does and you want so badly for things to be different. For none of it to have happened...for the unimaginable to still be the unimaginable and not reality. I know people who have experienced the unimaginable and reading this book has helped me to understand better just how deep the pain can be, and how much strength it takes to keep going.

Here is a link to the trailer for the movie coming out in a couple of weeks:http://www.imdb.com/rg/s/4/title/tt0477302/#lb-vi2238291481