My Laptop Fell

I dropped my laptop today. It catapulted off my desk and landed on its bottom. A dent that looks too close to a bite mark has scarred its upper left corner. I watched as my million and one open tabs became blurred with cyan-magenta-yellow streaks and fireworks in a brilliant flash before it all dramatically faded to black. I can’t get the display to work and I think I cracked the screen on the inside; any pressure I applied in an attempt to get it to work again grew a white crevice that creeped from my keyboard up to my laptop’s camera. I was playing with the preset PhotoBooth filters on it yesterday.

I clutched my phone a little bit too hard when I walked onto the Metrorail today. My biggest concern at that moment was that it would fall through the gap between the train car and the platform. That’s never happened to me before, but neither have I dropped my laptop before. My phone was fine.

I’ve recently become oddly emotional over baby pictures. I haven’t seen one of mine in ages. My favorite picture, the first picture in the “favorites” album, is one of my brother, maybe five years old, wearing GAP pajamas and lime green Crocs standing in the middle of an empty, dark art gallery (the Met? the MOMA? Time has rotted my memory away) and pointing up at a massive classical statue. Probably something Ancient Greek. 

I was the sibling that always worried about everything. He was (and still is) the opposite; he was a powerful ball of energy and light whose gap-toothed smile could not help but make you stop and enjoy the little things in life- ladybugs, the Moon, light-up sneakers.

His little rosy cheeks and platinum blond hair are only before that towering sculpture because my dad thought it would be a funny photo op. He was right. I don’t know why I tear up whenever I see that picture. He looks so innocent there; there are no hints of an awkward middle school stage or meaningless sibling squabbles in his eyes. I see a little boy who would beg me to watch just one more episode of Spongebob with him before bedtime and who would drag his (now unstuffed) porcupine stuffie everywhere.

I scrolled through my photo album and saw a picture of my great-grandmother. She died the week before my 17th birthday. I came to school the next day and it seemed like the only thing anyone wanted to talk about was how much they loved their own very much alive grandparents (great and just grand). It probably wasn’t on purpose (I hope), but there really couldn’t have been any worse timing for that. She was old (very, very, very old). I think that the moment my little toddler self’s brain could comprehend what death was, I lived every waking moment in fear that my Bis would pass. The weight I felt fearing for her death did not lift when she passed. I think it bore a hole too deep now to close (as angsty as it is to say). She lived a good, long, healthy life. She was funny; she never lost her mental clarity to any degenerative disease. She spoke Yiddish. I didn’t know that until last year.

The last time I saw her was last summer. It was winter there. The seasons switch with the hemispheres. She moved back to the rural town my mom grew up in after living in Mar del Plata my entire childhood. She had a balcony in that apartment that was covered in plants; my favorite was one with miniature violet blossoms dotting its leaves. Her kitchen in that apartment had a backdrop of 1960s-retro style orange flower tiles behind the gas stove she would make me breakfast on and next to the freezer she would fill with my favorite vanilla ice cream she got at the supermarket around the block.

Her new house was much more plain. The pièce de résistance that adorned the wall in her new dining room was a crude self-portrait I had made at a summer camp in elementary school. Next to that wooden panel were small paper sketches of my original masterpiece made by the rest of the great-grandchildren. Of me, of my face. On my great-grandmother’s wall.

I’m sure she knew that her time was running out (she was in her late 90s, after all) so there was no need to bother with the pleasantries of interior decor. But my painting was there. There was a lemon tree in the backyard. She told me she was excited to bake things with them once summer came (winter for us in the northern hemisphere).

My mom told me she was sick the weekend before we started our cation analysis in chem lab. Our professor was a fat old bald grouch that always yelled. I was in no mood.

I noticed the few white hairs that adorned my otherwise brown head more seriously that week. Monday I kept avoiding eye contact with my mom. I think my great-grandmother died that day.

Tuesday was lab day. I don’t remember how it went, but I do remember my eyes going numb and hearing my blood pump in my ear canals after mentioning this to my classmates and them deeming that an appropriate time to talk about how healthy their respective grandparents were at the time. My mom broke the news that night. I knew it before she even said anything when I came home and saw her reheating frozen potato knishes my grandmother left us prepared the last time she visited us. I could hear my downstairs neighbor screaming “LET’S FUCKING GO!” at whatever video game he was playing in between his damp gamer rage-induced thumps on the wall. I’ve always wanted to tell him about that but I don’t think he would really care anyway.

My parents told me that the reason we didn’t go to Argentina the winter before that January was because plane tickets were too expensive. They were probably right. MIA to EZE flights during the holidays are not cheap. But we have had no problem going every year before. 

I switched high schools for my junior and senior year to a program that lets me take dual enrollment classes at my local community college. The college’s and public school county’s winter break schedules do not line up; I was only given a one week break. One week was not enough to spend in Argentina. I was too worried to miss my college classes. But my parents said tickets to Florence were cheaper. I had a great time. Our flight home was delayed. I missed the first two days of class anyway.

We could have gone and seen her. There’s nothing I can do about that now, anyway. There’s no reason to dwell on it.

I’m now writing this on a laptop my mom lent me for the time being. Smooth, unbroken like how my old one was. Obviously. Her desktop is as cluttered as mine.

I log in and see scans of old, grainy childhood pictures of hers among her newer, high-def headshots she used for her LinkedIn profile. There’s an ancient looking black-and-white scan of what I can only assume are distant family members a couple generations separated from me. Am I crying a little now? Yes.

Oh, well. I’ll get over it eventually, I guess.