Eulogy For The Market
Friend, grocer, supplier. Of joy.
It’s days like these I miss you most. I wander aimlessly through the Square, craving stale sushi. I am itching to spend a small fortune on a single banana, but my money lies in my pocket, unspent. Money cannot buy back a friend subsumed by the Big Man, Himself.
Middlesex County Sheriff, why did you seize our friend?
They say grief never really goes away. Healing is indefinite. I mourn you, Market, from my core; the pain your loss has left me with is so massive as to be almost impossible to contemplate; I–oh, sorry haha my bad, that’s just my crushing fear of inadequacy and premature guilt at disappointing my family, thereby confirming everyone’s predictions that I would burn out by age 25 and never contribute anything more meaningful to society than that killer speech I wrote when I ran for student council president in middle school.
But also grief. The mourning. We suffer.
We miss you, Market. Where else will we go to order a tomato, basil, mozzarella sandwich that comes with spinach leaves instead of basil? How will we go on absent the strangely resonant cafe area which allowed us eavesdroppings into conversations we most definitely did not want to hear? Whence will the hordes of famished theatre kids receive the requisite sustenance to feed their tech-week gossip about the wildly incompetent leading lady who stepped in after the first actress suffered a fracture in her femur due to a rogue set piece shaped like a narwhal which may or may not have been deliberately planted by the replacement leading lady herself???
Even the name–Market! So historic. So dignified. This noble antiquity, too, we will miss. Paul Revere trotted in, parked his horse by the gourmet chip bar, ordered a dragon roll. Benedict Arnold slid through in a trench coat and shades, perused the world’s largest selection of seltzer waters, went with raspberry. The entire British army in their cute red blazers plodded in after a big L jonesing for that good fried tofu, and the checkout folks didn’t bat an eye. All were welcome here.
This place eked out history with an authenticity that no building in Cambridge could possibly match.
O, Middlesex County Sheriff. You know not what you do.
“Seized.” What a terrible way to go. No one deserves such a violent, public demise. Years from now, long after Goldman internships have robbed us of our abilities to access emotion, we will pass each other in the halls of the prisons the robots have built for us, and we will accidentally make eye contact. And for a brief, shining moment, the memory of a tragedy so acute, so collective, so unfair, will surge through the haze of unfeeling and we will remember what it feels like to feel. We will remember.
We will never forget you, Market.
Middlesex County Sheriff, you knave. Why? Why?? Also, did you have to slap that six-pointed star on the sign? Leave the Jews out of this one, please. We really don’t need the blame for anything else.
And so, we suffer. We mourn. There is wailing and gnashing of teeth. Scratch that second one–we have nothing left to gnash.
Friends, family, passing tourists who are maybe speaking Dutch: Together we grieve. Thank you.