Innocent friend: I feel like I shouldn’t ask. But you’ve helped me so much. I just want to know if there’s anything I can do for you? What’s your pain? How do you survive?
Pause.
Not-so-innocent friend: Sorry, I shouldn’t have asked. I just wanted to know your take on things.
My trembling fingers: A question is a crystalline point. A beginning. A meeting of two minds, no matter their lack of symmetry or energy. Such a thing is never to be regretted. No question should be lost in denial of the desire to ask it. If it has been asked, it was worth the asking.
My take? Well, that’s what we call a dangerous question.
The universe is just there;that’s the only way a person can view it and remain the master of his senses. The universe neither threatens nor promises. It holds things beyond our sway: the fall of a meteor, the eruption of a star, growing old and dying. These are the realities of this universe, and they must be faced regardless of how you feel about them. You cannot fend off such realities with words. They will come at you in their own wordless way and then, then you will understand what is meant by ‘life and death’.
That, my friend, is a very clever lie. That is what I tell myself in my moments where all that matter is survival and try so bitterly to forget afterwards. Life is a personal experience, relative only to itself. You cannot escape the absolutes which we build for ourselves. No, you can merely reshape them to match your changing identity. Life is for living. It is taking in the universe through the pores of your soul and being changed by it. There is no word big or little enough for life, for we are all both utterly meaningless and impossibly important.
