The Stories Left Behind

I think everyone has moments that feel larger than life. Moments that are insanely happy, when you're on top of the world and nothing can touch you.

The invincible person that you are in that moment is infinite. They have everything, they feel everything.

When you're a kid, everything feels like it exists within the bounds of forever. All of your experiences, all of your family, and especially your friends, they all feel like these permanent, untouchable beings that will be with you until you're gone.

Everything is invincible.

Until it isn't.

They don't prepare you for when you have to watch someone leave first. No one could possibly do that for you. It's the cruelest fate, learning how to live with loss.

A couple of weeks after I turned fifteen, one of my oldest friends died. It was my freshman year of high school, and we had just spent a semester settling in. We kicked off the second semester, and just as everything felt normal coming back from a seemingly unspecial winter break, tragedy decided to make itself known.

It's a winter break I went back to often because it's the last time I remember seeing her.

Everything felt incredibly real all of a sudden. This was the world around me. People lived until they died, and you never knew how long anyone had, including yourself.

I remember thinking of death more often than I should've been. I had been struggling with horrible bouts of anxiety before she had passed away, and they only got worse following.

I couldn't stop thinking about it. Every happy moment I had quickly turned sour, as if I couldn't be happy while knowing that it would end. One day, all of this happiness would be gone, and with that hanging over my head, I was miserable.

Over it all, there was one jarring question: Who would be next?

It was a question that spiraled into many more over the course of the next year.

Who would we have to bury? Who was I going to mourn?

Would it be me?

Suddenly I couldn't feel all that well. I had been in this funk for a while now, weirdly affected, and dragged into this existential hole that was taking too long to crawl out of.

Then I realized I wasn't mourning anymore. I wasn't even sad.

I was nothing.

This was the moment that changed my life. It wasn't death, it wasn't the loss of innocence.

It was the loss of me.

Somewhere along the path of recovery, I took a wrong turn. As the years passed, I couldn't blame the death of a friend anymore for my sadness.

There was no reason. I couldn't find a valid one.

Why was I so miserable when everyone had moved on?

Why did the feeling linger?

Losing someone made me realize how fragile life is. You hear people say that all the time, but it still took a couple of years after she died for it to finally hit me that people die, and that I'm going to die, too.

And it hit me hard. I sobbed for days, couldn't smile, couldn't eat. That was the worst of it, but it's the steady pain that affects you the most, the one you can never quite shake.

I mourned my friend, and then I spent the next few years mourning myself. Presently, I'm not doing all that great. It gets better and then it gets worse. I probably need to see a therapist, and it wouldn't hurt to get blood work done. I could take better care of myself and my relationships. I could work harder. I could do more for myself.

The truth is, though, there isn't a measurement for self-health. The demented parts of my brain would like me to think that I'm horrible for neglecting all of those things, but Rome wasn't built in a day and neither is this life that I've finally begun living.

"I could do more" has turned into "I'm going to do what I can".

I'm not as weak, I'm not as easily broken. More now than ever before, I understand the importance of living life every day, not just watching it pass you by.

To quote Ava Dellaira, "There's more to life than being a passenger."

I don't want to coast along, fumbling through every day and wishing it would end already.

I don't want it to end. After years of not understanding my own feelings, they are so much clearer in the light.

I just had to step out into it to see them.