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Originally uploaded by ericandkatherine
I don’t care how many calories are in those damn tortillas, I fucking love Chipotle.
I work in the Chinatown district of downtown Washington, DC, which has a ton of restaurants, thus, a ton of tourists. I am equally sympathetic for and appalled by the tendency of people to eat at familiar chains when they travel. On one hand, people are in a strange place and familiar things can provide a welcome anchor. On the other, you have to admit that there is something incredibly lame about traveling to some other place just to eat the same food you could have at home. But people do, in droves.
The only real problem I have with this is that when people travel to DC and decide to go to Chipotle, they are going to my local Chipotle, which means there are always lines down the block at my local Chipotle, which means I never get to go to my local Chipotle.
Every once in awhile when the weather is crap and school is in session, God will smile upon me and there is no line at Chipotle when I walk by. This was one of those days.
Chipotle, like every chain restaurant in DC, is staffed by a collection of disgruntled African-American and Latino youth who, in all truth, run the entire city. If they all just got up and left, the city would cease to function entirely. It’s just one example of how there are two Washington, DCs. There is the Washington of people who work in restaurants, and the Washington of people who eat in those restaurants. There is the Washington of people who own multi-million dollar townhouses, and the Washington of those who build, clean, and maintain those townhouses. Those DC residents that aren’t self-righteous assholes (and there are a handful of us) try to be aware of this and straddle the two worlds as best we can.
When I made it up to the counter at Chipotle, I noticed the cashier, Teshawna, had a huge tattoo on her forearm. It was two interlocking roses and vines surrounding a scroll that read, “Carter,” and below it “1979 – 2001.” She really didn’t seem like she was interested in doing anything other than making change for my steak fajita burrito, but I wanted, so badly, to ask her about the tattoo. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-two herself, which means that she was barely a teenager when Carter died. Was Carter her brother? A cousin or friend? I wanted to know how he died and what his life was like. It is so easy to make assumptions about the deaths of young black men (assuming that Carter was a young black man)—and Carter very well may have lived that cliché—but I was still curious.
More than anything, I wanted to tell her I knew that pain.
It’s very easy to get caught up in your own pain and think it's novel—to go around thinking that the rest of the world is blissfully numb to what you experience. But Teshawna and I aren’t unique, everyone has experienced painful loss. It is the great unifier and equalizer. The haves, the have-nots. The inner-city kids who take the bus to this job they hate and the tourists from Alabama who eat the tacos they make. The K Street lawyers and the average Joes they exploit. They all miss someone or something that’s gone. Joy is part of the human experience, but so is pain. In a balanced life—or even in an unbalanced life—one is meaningless without the presence of the other.
There was a time when I wondered why people got pets. They live for a couple years and then they die. You fall in love with this animal, knowing that in a few years you will suffer through the pain of their death. But as time has gone past, I've learned that the reason people do it is because the hurt is worth it. The love and joy mean so much that it’s worth the absolutely unavoidable grief attached. It’s almost as if the grief is the price you pay for all the happiness.
The same isn’t true of people though. While we are sad when Uncle Bart dies at eighty-seven after suffering four heart attacks and prostate cancer, when someone young dies, we are angry. When someone young dies, we feel we’ve been cheated. When someone says that a young person’s death is “tragic”—I always wonder…to whom? Is it tragic that the dead missed out on the rest of a never-meant-to-happen life or is the tragedy the pain inflicted on those left behind?
When I look at Teshawna’s arm, the real question I want to ask her is if she got that tattoo because she missed Carter so badly or is it because she wanted everyone to know how angry she is? The only thing I know for sure is that now, years after his death, Carter is no longer a brother, cousin, or friend. Carter is gone, Carter is dust.
Now, Carter is a symbol. A symbol of something inside of her. He is her ghost—an icon for her pain or anger or both. Ghosts can be many things. Sometimes they are burned into your memory, sometimes they are burned into your soul, and sometimes they are burned into your arm.
