But ultimately I do not believe that she was only matter. The rest of her must be recycled, too. I believe now that we are greater than the sum of our parts. If you take Alaska’s genetic code and you add her life experiences and the relationships she had with people, and then you take the size and shape of her body, you do not get her. There is something else entirely. There is a part of her greater than the sum of her knowable parts. And that part has to go somewhere, because it cannot be destroyed.
But there’s a Sufi story that challenges the notion that people believe only because they need an opiate. Rabe’a al-Adiwiyah, a great woman saint of Sufism, was seen running through the streets of her hometown, Basra, carrying a torch in one hand and a bucket of water in the other. When someone asked her what she was doing, she answered, ‘I am going to take this bucket of water and pour it on the flames of hell, and then I am going to use this torch to burn down the gates of paradise so that people will not love God for want of heaven or fear of hell, but because He is God.
Most adults are just hollowed out. You watch them try to fill themselves up with booze or money or God or fame or whatever they worship, and it all rots them from the inside until nothing is left but the money or the booze or God they though would save them. Adults think they are wielding power, but really power is wielding them.
There were so many of us who would have to live with things done and things left undone that day. Things that did not go right, things that seemed okay at the time because we could not see the future. If only we could see the endless string of consequences that result from our smallest actions. But we can’t know better until knowing better is useless.
I would never slay the dragon, because the dragon was also me.
Before I got here, I thought that the way out of the labyrinth was to pretend that it didn’t exist, to build a small, self-sufficient world in the back corner of the endless maze and to pretend that I was not lost, but home. But that only led to a lonely life accompanied by the last words of the already dead, so I came here looking for a Great Perhaps, for real friends and a more-than-minor life.
It was not enough to be the last guy she kissed. I wanted to be the last one she loved. And I knew I wasn’t. I knew it, and I hated her for it. I hated her for not caring about me. I hated her for leaving that night, and I hated myself, too, not only because I let her go but because if I had been enough for her, she wouldn’t have even wanted to leave. She would have just lain with me and talked and cried, and I would have listened and kissed at her tears as they pooled in her eyes.
People always talk like there’s a bright line between imagination and memory, but there isn’t, at least not for me. I remember what I’ve imagined and imagine what I remember.
Worrying is the correct worldview. Life is worrisome.
Life is a series of choices between wonders.
Every loss is unprecedented. You can’t ever know someone else’s hurt, not really – just like touching someone else’s body isn’t the same as having someone else’s body.
She noted, more than once, that the meteor shower was happening, beyond the overcast sky, even if we could not see it. Who cares if she can kiss? She can see through the clouds.
Nobody gets anybody else, not really. We’re all stuck inside ourselves.
I thought, lying there, that I might love him for the rest of my life. We did love each other – maybe we never said it, and maybe love was never something we were in, but it was something I felt. I loved him, and I thought, maybe I will never see him again, and I’ll be stuck missing him, and isn’t that so terrible.
Radar revs the engine as to say hustle, and we are running through the parking lot, Ben’s robe flowing in the wind so that he looks vaguely like a dark wizard, except that his pale skinny legs are visible, and his arms hug plastic bags. I can see the back of Lacey’s legs beneath her dress, her calves tight in midstride. I don’t know how I look, but I know how I feel: Young. Goofy. Infinite.
Like, the world is billions of years old, and life is a product of nucleotide mutation and everything. But the world is also the stories we tell about it.
It’s so weird, to know you’re crazy and not be able to do anything about it, you know? It’s not like you believe yourself to be normal. You know there is a problem. But you can’t figure a way through to fixing it. Because you can’t be sure, you know?
I missed everybody. To be alive is to be missing.
And I kept thinking about how sky is a singular noun, as if it’s one thing. But the sky isn’t one thing. The sky is everything. And last night, it was enough.
Look up long enough and you start to feel your infinitesimality. The difference between alive and not – that’s something. But from where the stars are watching, there is almost no difference between varieties of alive, between me and the newly mown grass I’m lying on right now. We are both astonishments, the closest thing in the know universe to a miracle.