Both my roommates are gone now.
It was sad, but not all that sad.
These events, these transitions, aren’t always so ceremonial.
They are small, and they happen fast, and you can’t always savor them the way you’d hoped you could.
You anticipate them, and then they happen, like that, and then it’s on to the next stage.
I am gonna miss the guys, though. It wasn’t always easy, we weren’t always civil, I was sometimes an ass . . . But the good outweighed the bad.
The laughs, the beach trips, the nights out, the Rocket League sessions, screaming at the TV, who’s gonna make the cookies tonight, those things are all great times, and I will be forever grateful.
I think these things always take time to process, and it sort of feels like it’s because I don’t want to believe it’s over . . . And it’s not even that I’d want to live that way for the rest of my life, or even another year, but that there’s always a pain to growth, to moving forward.
Because no matter how good what lies ahead of you is, you always gotta cut something loose, let something go, leave something behind, in order to grasp the next rung. And that is an inherently sad thing.
I think too, spreading the realization of this termination of an era out over time, rather than trying to fit it all into one moment, eases the severity of the pain.
You know, with these things, people don’t really like to say goodbye as fully as they could. Because if they did, they’d feel that this truly is the end of an era.
You don’t want to hold a hug for so long because you want to believe it’s not the last hug you’ll ever give. You say things like, “I know I’ll see you soon,” and “I’ll be around,” and “I’ll stop by on my next trip,” but the truth is that these things very often don’t ever happen.
So we almost numb ourselves to the pain of the reality of the termination of the times we’ve lived by refusing to acknowledge their apparent finitude. Isn’t that such a weird thing?
And this is why death is so special. So powerful.
We may be able to convince ourselves that we’ll see our roommates again, and we very well will . . . But we cannot deceive ourselves like this in death.
And we always tell ourselves that we’ll see the loved one in the next life and that we hope they’re happy where they are, and relieved that their suffering is over . . .
You know, I do believe we continue on in some way, though not in the way we think about things like Heaven. I’m not so sure there’s a pool party going on in the sky, waiting for us to join.
I think it’s far more incomprehensible than that. Something disjoint from the human conscious experience.
I’ve had this idea today, and I’d just like to flesh it out here because I could see it becoming a chapter in my next book:
And I guess you could say it sort of flows from my rant above . . . In that, we always say we’ll see people soon, and we’ll stop by, and this and that, but, more often than not, these things never happen.
And so this idea that I’ve had has got to do with the fact that most humans are incredibly bad at executing, and because of this, we become sort of depressed because we feel incapable of doing the things we dream of and, therefore, come to feel helpless.
I sort of talked about this in the letter I posted last night from my journal on the 14th . . . In that, I have, by moving out to Charleston and pursuing my dreams and being patient with the process, cultivated this very valuable skill set, which is that of actually doing the things I say I’m going to do and remaining persistent, which opens up far more worlds of possibility than you might think, because, as I said, “ . . . without persistence, not much other than what’s immediately before you is possible.”
You know, I was talking with one of my online buddies yesterday, and one of the things we talked about was how magical life is and, more specifically, how we are indeed capable of magic. Not in the Harry Potter sort of way, but in the we can envision and manifest sort of way.
The only thing that makes us different from wizards is the fact that it takes more time for us to manifest what we envision.
This creative ability—to imagine something and then make it real—is what makes life magical. And when people stop believing that they are capable of imagining something and making it real, their life loses its magic, and they become, for lack of a better word, depressed, because they are helpless.