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And if I disappeared from the world? Well, I suppose nothing would change at all. Things would probably just go on, day after day … same as usual.
things I want to do before I die,” I admitted. “Oh, really?” “At least, I don’t think I could come up with ten. And the ones I can think of are all probably pretty boring.”
Here I was standing at death’s door and I couldn’t think of a single person I cared enough about to call. I’ve connected with many people over the course of my life, but the relationships were ultimately all superficial.
“In order to gain something, you have to lose something,” she always said. People are always trying to get something for nothing. But that’s just theft. If you’ve gained something, it means that someone, somewhere, has lost something. Even happiness is built on someone else’s misfortune. She often reminded me of this. In fact, she considered it one of the laws of the universe.
“When you wear this hat, you’ll be like a pebble on the ground—unnoticed.”
Wow, I thought. So this is what I have to listen to during what could be my final days on earth? Did my life even have any meaning? Was it worth the effort? Is this all you remember about the man you once loved?
“I liked talking to you on the phone. You used to get so excited about music and novels. It was as if the world had suddenly transformed. I liked you best when you talked so passionately. I might have even loved you, even though you were somehow incapable of coming up with something to talk about when we’d meet in person.” “Yeah. You’re right about the phone calls,” I agreed. “It was the same way for me. I remember when you’d talk about movies, your voice would change and everything felt different, for some reason.”
“There are so many cruel things in the world,” he once told us. “But there are also just as many beautiful things.”
I turned the page, and there was the figure of Christ the Redeemer on top of a mountain in the Andes, towering over the surrounding area. I wondered whether Tom had actually made it there, or if he died before getting a chance to see it. I imagined him getting off the bus and gazing down at the beautiful land spread out below the mountaintop. As he turns around, he notices the huge shadow of the cross and looks up to see the figure of Christ, arms open in a welcoming gesture. The sun hangs behind the statue at shoulder height, silhouetting it brightly against the clear sky, and Tom squints as
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This is probably why, when we finally stepped out of the Monopoly game we’d been playing around our little college town and into the real world, we found out that the old rules—the things that made our relationship possible in that particular time and place—no longer applied.
When we parted ways at the station near her house, she gave me a faint smile as we said our good-byes. I still remember that smile. It was embedded in my memory and implanted somewhere deep in my heart. It was like an old football injury that ached on rainy days. But I guess that’s not that unusual. I must have a whole collection of small injuries, tucked away somewhere in the recesses of my memory. I suppose those are what some people call regrets.
“Love is an eternal teacher,”
I guess it’s the same with life. We all know it has to end someday, but even so, we act as if we’re going to live forever. Like love, life is beautiful because it must come to an end.
I didn’t want to die, or to be more precise, it’s not that I didn’t want to die; it’s just that I couldn’t stand the fear of facing death head-on, of approaching the end of the line.
“Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long shot.”
“There’s something just as inevitable as death. And that’s life.”
“What do you want meaning for? Life is about desire, not meaning. Life is a beautiful, magnificent thing, even to a jellyfish.”
It seems to me that the idea of something disappearing from the world and what the world would actually be like without it are two totally different things. It’s not only about the thing suddenly not being there. There’s something else that happens that can’t be measured. It’s a real loss, an emptiness that’s created. It’s so small you could miss it, but without anyone noticing, our lives are changed completely.
It’s the future you’ll never get to see that you really regret missing most of all when you die.
“Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long shot.” The dream I’d had earlier that morning came back to me.
To live means to cry, to shout, to love, to do silly things, to feel sadness and joy, to laugh, even to experience horrible, frightening things. Beautiful songs, beautiful scenery, nausea, people singing, planes flying across the sky, the thundering hooves of horses, mouthwatering pancakes, the endless darkness of space, cowboys firing their pistols at dawn …
“Okay. Action!” Her voice rang out from the projection room. The show began. Light projected onto the screen. But there was nothing there but a blank space, a rectangle of white light illuminating the screen. I had chosen nothing. As I gazed at the blank screen, I remembered a photograph I once saw. It was a picture of the inside of a movie theater. The photo was taken from the projection room and showed the seats and the screen. The photograph had captured one entire film and was taken by opening the shutter at the beginning of the film and then not closing it again until the film ended. In
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All the joy, anger, and sorrow I’ve been through, the result of which would be nothing more than a blank screen. There’s nothing there, nothing left. Only an empty space.
What did I gain by growing up, and what did I lose? I know the answer to only the second part of that question. Innocence—all those precious hopes and dreams that you can only have when you’re in your adolescence.
“You only realize what the really important things are once you’ve lost them.”
Just as cats don’t have any sense of time, loneliness must not exist for them either. There’s simply the time you spend alone and the time you spend with others.
I suppose loneliness is another thing that only human beings feel.
Love. That’s the expression Mom wears on her face in that photograph. What else could you call it apart from love? And love, this magical thing that’s unique to human beings and can sometimes make us absolutely miserable, is also the thing that buoys the human spirit. Like time, color, temperature, and loneliness, love is one of those things that only humans experience. These things can rule over or control us, but they also allow us to live more fully. They are precisely what make us human.
“Yeah, but just being alive doesn’t mean all that much on its own. How you live is more important.”
A lot of people buy into the slogan “Live life like there’s no tomorrow.” But I tend to disagree. Once you become aware of your impending death, you have to make a compromise in accepting the loss of the life you wish you could have led and the reality of your imminent death. Sure, there will always be regrets and broken dreams, but you have to go easy on yourself. Over the last few days, I’ve come to realize that there’s a certain beauty in those regrets. They’re proof of having lived.
