life, pt. 4

Eleutheria.

Things started to really fall apart just before I finally fled. I was depressed and ended up abandoning a lot of commitments I'd made, which of course made me feel even worse. So I tried to trick myself into getting motivated by falling in love with this kid I'd only known for a month, and then convincing myself that if that fell through at least I had this other boy I wasn't particularly into but who liked me well enough to fall back on. And it worked, for a while. I dreamed up a future with both of them (but mostly just the first one) and was sure that, as soon as it all worked out, the depression would go away and life would continue as smoothly as it ever had.

There were a number of flaws in this plan, of course, but the one that seems most glaring now is that I failed to take into account that these people lived their own lives when I wasn't around, and those lives weren't going to line up neatly just because I'd planned things that required them to. After our lives had briefly intersected, their lives veered off quite radically. Since I was relying on them as something of a psychological safety net, this didn't work out particularly well.

I spent a lot of time writing about how capricious life can be after that. I've still got pages upon pages of me, waxing eloquent about life and its inherent unreliability. All of it, of course, is written with the assumption that when I talk about "life" I'm the only figure that really matters, and with the assumption that "life" is something you can figure out.

It's not, of course. It took me a while to finally understand that, but I finally did: life means everyone. Everyone you will ever meet has this entire universe living inside them, and no matter how close you get to them, you can only ever brush the surface. Once you've figured that out, it's a lot easier to come to terms with.