There is a difference between a death and a murder.

Between the ages of nine and eighteen, I attended a funeral every six months. Two of the funerals were for people who died in my home, in the bedroom next to mine.

I have a distinct memory of an eighth grade classmate assuming a relative of mine died one day when she saw me crying in the bathroom. No one had died. I was just thirteen.

The first time I knew someone who was murdered, I was eighteen. A high school classmate, someone in my outer circle of friends, was gunned down at Virginia Tech. I did not know him as well as I knew my grandfather (famously died at St. Patrick’s day dinner) or my great uncle (another resident of the room next to mine). But I think of him with more frequency, stuck in a strange limbo of grief for someone you barely know.

The second time I knew someone who was murdered was this month. A houseless man I knew was stabbed to death by a man with a house. He died trying to help someone move their stuff after being displaced due to a sweep. I was there when the sweep was set to begin (6AM), but not there when the sweep actually began (3PM). This man was murdered by a combination of state forces and the violence entrenched in a society with values as meaningless as ours.

I did not know him as well as my uncle (died when I was twelve) or my other grandfather (eighteen). But, like my high school classmate, I will think of him frequently.

The thing about a murder is that you are forced to see it again and again. When people die at Sandy Hook or Uvalde, at Pulse or Charleston, I see the murder of my classmate again.

I have already seen the murder of the unhoused man play out again. My city councilmember ordered five sweeps on a day with 100-degree heat. Seven people die each day on the streets of Los Angeles.

The bodies keep piling up.

We live in a world of institutions. Institutions cannot have moral clarity.

This is the pain of a murder, seeing it happen again and again.

Los Angeles is a city of institutions, each morally depraved in its own way. It is basically non-functional; an enormous slush fund for politicians and the rainbow coalition of Klansmen known colloquially as the LAPD.

Despite all this, a few years ago, the city sent me a tiny bucket in which to throw my food scraps. Once a week or so, I empty the tiny bucket which sits on my stoop into the larger green bin next to my apartment. At times like this, when everyone I care about is under attack due to the world’s increasing fascism, all that’s holding me together is that small bucket.

In the bucket, my food scraps collect and build and breed. They create a coherent moldy mass. This mass—of grey fuzz, like clouds on the rainy days I worry will vanish—will happily slide into the green bin later in the week. There will be almost nothing left behind.

When I feel down, I often look in my compost bucket. I may not be around for the world I wish to create. But, like the carrot peel and green onion bottom and apple core, perhaps our disjointed actions will cohere to form something I cannot see because I live inside it.

And, even if that doesn’t happen, it is good to remember the mold will still thrive, even when all the institutions collapse under their own sclerotic weight.