i spend my days waiting. waiting for the water to boil and my tea to be ready. for spring to come back. for more daylight. the oil in the pan to heat up. a “hey i miss you” or “can you help me out for a second?” or “you want to hang out?” text. for my phone to finish charging. for good news. flowers on the table. the next hug. “hey, you got the job!”. waiting for the sun. to set. to rise. to see both. for summer to be around the corner. a good song. a falling star. a text back. i spend my time waiting to be remembered. i spend my time repeating that tomorrow will be better. tomorrow will be better. i spend my days waiting and waiting and waiting. i spend my days waiting unbearably.
i love tragedy i love circular narratives i love ppl who cannot escape their fate & characters that have been dead since the beginning
“You will always go into that tent. You will see her scar and wonder where she got it. You will always be amazed at how one woman can have so much black hair. You will always fall in love, and it will always be like having your throat cut, just that fast. You will always run away with her. You will always lose her. You will always be a fool. You will always be dead, in a city of ice, snow falling into your ear. You have already done all of this and will do it again.”
[transcript: A Quora question from an unidentified user that reads “How do I overcome the sadness about the fact that everyone I love and care about will die eventually?”
The top response is from Michael Bergmann. It reads:
By understanding the place that time has in your life. It is entirely appropriate to be sad—after each person dies, not now. [Note: the words “after” and “not now” are in bold.]
After all, it’s not just death: everything, absolutely everything changes. When you find something or someone you like or love you can try to hold on to that someone or something through the changes which are coming—and as long as you accept the changes you can hold on to the (changed) version of that someone or something for quite a while.
For example, parents can love their children for years and decades — providing they don’t try to hold onto the way their children used to be. If you meet someone you love, that person will surely die — but only once. Before that happens you can make love dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands of times.
Do not confuse yourself with a rock. Inanimate nature rushes towards entropy. Mountains erode down to the sea. Our dead bodies decay into soil. But, at the moment, we are not inanimate so we don’t participate in all that, and to be sad about deaths that have not happened yet is to misunderstand your place among the living. We are alive and living things do not go to entropy, quite the opposite. Living things create organization. Trees create tree rings and leaves or needles of a certain shape and color. People create meaning and then sites like Quora to share the meaning we have found or created. Do not rush towards death, it will come for you by itself. In the meantime, participate in all that is not death. And while you are to be commended for not denying the inevitability of death, you also should not do death’s work for it. Leave death to death. There is a great deal to do in the meantime and you might as well enjoy it.
One thing you can enjoy is the fact that you are not alone with this issue. Here, for example, is Shakespeare (Sonnet 64):
Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate That Time will come and take my love away.
Read the whole sonnet. And then more sonnets. Many of them are quite astoundingly beautiful. And then see whether you aren’t more happy that Shakespeare lived than sad that he died.
