I have been unfaithful to my
love. Yes, my love; the forever kinds. He was around me all the time but I
neglected him, ignored his presence, and brushed aside his advances. He was
forlorn but yet remained relentless. Minutes transcended to hours and hours to
days, when he sat next to me reminding and making me relive the calm,
fascinating and absorbing companionship of his. With undying effort, he charmed
me back with his old world scent, the reservoir of sorcerous lines and plethora
of knowledge. And as I rediscovered the lost love, I found solace from every question, every
dilemma which troubled my mind during our time apart.
This description seems slightly
made up? Something that dreams or fairy tales are made of? Seems to be an
experience only a perfect partner (a mythical term) can give? Yes it is. And it
is so, only because my forever is: BOOKS. Ah! Gave you a googly there, didn’t
I? ;)
After I finally did get back, I
thought of picking up a ‘light’ read. Following up my experience of John
Green’s Fault in Our Stars, I picked up his earlier writing – Looking for
Alaska. Fault in out Stars was a roller coaster of heart wrenching emotions. A
book not heavy on the mind; emotionally draining for the heart. I was expecting
Looking for Alaska, to be on the same lines but it was far from it. Looking for
Alaska was reality. It was depressing, it was fun, and it was riddled with deep
questions about life disguised as adolescent problems.
What this book did, was answer a
very basic question for me. A question which remains dormant in all our minds
but when it becomes active, it is like a vicious volcanic eruption, eating away
at every possible thing. It wraps its tentacles and feeds on all our sources of
hope. Looking for Alaska answered this for me:
Q: How will you—you
personally—ever get out of this labyrinth of suffering?
(To understand this answer in
it’s true glory, read the brief on the book here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Looking_for_Alaska,
if you haven’t read the book already)
A: (As written by Miles)
Before I got here, I thought for a long time that the way out of the
labyrinth was to pretend that it did not exist, to build a small,
self-sufficient world in a 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 only
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. And then I screwed up and
the Colonel screwed up and Takumi screwed up and she slipped through our
fingers. And there's no sugarcoating it: She deserved better friends.
When she fucked up, all those years ago, just a little girl terrified
into paralysis, she collapsed into the enigma of herself. And I could have done
that, but I saw where it led for her. So I still believe in the Great Perhaps,
and I can believe in it in spite of having lost her.
Because I will forget her, yes. That which came together will fall
apart imperceptibly slowly, and I will forget, but she will forgive my
forgetting, just as I forgive her for forgetting me and the Colonel and
everyone but herself and her mom in those last moments she spent as a person. I
know now that she forgives me for being dumb and scared and doing the dumb and
scared thing. I know she forgives me, just as her mother forgives her. And
here's how I know:
I thought at first that she was
just dead. Just darkness. Just a body being eaten by bugs. I thought about her
a lot like that, as something's meal. What was her—green eyes, half a smirk,
the soft curves of her legs—would soon be nothing, just the bones I never saw.
I thought about the slow process of becoming bone and then fossil and then coal
that will, in millions of years, be mined by humans of the future, and how they
would heat their homes with her, and then she would be smoke billowing out of a
smokestack, coating the atmosphere. I still think that, sometimes, think that
maybe "the afterlife" is just something we made up to ease the pain
of loss, to make our time in the labyrinth bearable. Maybe she was just matter,
and matter gets recycled.
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. Although no one will ever accuse me
of being much of a science student, one thing I learned from science classes is
that energy is never created and never destroyed.
And if Alaska took her own life, that is the hope I wish I could have
given her. Forgetting her mother, failing her mother and her friends and
herself—those are awful things, but she did not need to fold into herself and
self-destruct. Those awful things are survivable, because we are as
indestructible as we believe ourselves to be. When adults say, "Teenagers
think they are invincible" with that sly, stupid smile on their faces,
they don't know how right they are. We need never be hopeless, because we can
never be irreparably broken. We think that we are invincible because we are. We
cannot be born, and we cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes
and sizes and manifestations. They forget that when they get old. They get
scared of losing and failing. But that part of us greater than the sum of our
parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail.
So I know she forgives me, just as I forgive her. Thomas Edison's last
words were: "It's very beautiful over there." I don't know where
there is, but I believe it's somewhere, and I hope it's beautiful.
What is your labyrinth and how
will you – you personally - get out it?
