Monday, February 21, 2011

The Legacy


I don't know if you know this because I've never really told anyone:

But the things you did affect us all.







Even I, so distant and far from you, find myself thinking of you on simple, normal days. Almost missing you.

I think the part that shocked me most, is that I was affected. Secretly, in something deeper in me than I can put into words, even almost a year later, I still don't know what it is. I always tell myself that it's just a part of life, to be expected. And if the person wasn't your pillar you shouldn't be allowed to break down. I tell myself that people grieve over their lost chance of putting something off. Over regret for not having lived the way they still had time to live. I try to be super zen about the whole thing. Super blase. But something indescribable in me twisted and turned and changed.

Some choices are final, even when the whole world would stop and hold their breathe and wish if they knew it could change that. It cannot change. But if it could, I wish you would know the way the world would shift without you, its axis offset.

Maybe the part of me that reacts, is the part that yearns and aches for it. For that same release. That morbid, fatalistic, and quitting part of me. Is it jealousy? Is it anger at a decision I cannot make? Or is it the glaring realization that life affects more than just one person. More than just walls you support. More than your closest inner circle. Maybe each time it happens, it's a lesson I'm learning on how to life. How to properly live. How I need to survive. How we all need to survive. It's a reminder that morbidity and fatalism and quitting are hard to live through, but we cannot have a choice.

There is a legacy that I see that changes the lives all around me. A girl that was once just a girl becomes referenced by the life and the love that she has lost. A boy that was just a boy has a subtitle of the ones who left him behind.

I am one of the free, this I know. I can keep myself far, I can swallow it down. I am distant, after all. But this what I'm thinking about day in and day out: The way you welcomed me with open arms, the way I secretly hoped you'd become my close friend, how I stumble on you sometimes on facebook or twitter. 

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