Lost.

Today in my teenage angst, I reflect upon the human experience of loss.

About a week ago, this girl that I sort of knew, though I'm not sure we ever actually met, was in a car accident and died. When I got the news, I didn't react. I thought about her family and I was sad. But I didn't cry. I was never overwhelmed with emotion. Though, as I was re-watching How I Met Your Mother, I cried a little harder than necessary at the death of Marshall's father.

As I said goodbye to people before they travelled home for Christmas, I had an overwhelming sense of doom. You know, that realization that at any moment, anyone could be taken from my life. I pride myself on the ability to achieve a level of empathy that allows me to see people in their contexts.

This generally gives me a sense of the "big picture". This is a great thing, and a really awful thing. In the immediate of a horrific moment, I can see the goodness of what can and will arise from that moment. This, I suppose, would be my gearing toward optimism. On the negative end, this removes me from the importance of the moment and I end up trivializing it. I don't like, trivialize it out loud, but in my mind, it becomes small. I don't like to talk about it, I try not to think about it, I watch more TV.

Having (sort of) experienced this measure of loss, I am forced to realize that I'm kind of lost when it comes to loss. All I want to say is that we don't have to be sad now because some sort of goodness will come out of this! So let's not be sad but instead talk about fun things and be normal. But it's not normal. It's loss.

It's like when you have a bunch of marbles in a box. They all line up pretty well and they look good. Then you take one out. There's a hole. It looks incomplete. But then the marbles move and roll and adjust to the absence of that missing marble. This seems like a stupid example because the presence of the hole and the marble adjustment is almost instantaneous. But it's relative right? Everything is relative. I just like to think about that inevitable adjustment. And after the adjustment, sometimes the marbles line up even better than before. This doesn't make the missing marble unnecessary, by any means. If that marble hadn't been present, the marbles wouldn't have realigned themselves the way they did when it was taken away. I'm coming to realize that maybe there is a lot to be said for the time leading up to the adjustment, however short it may be.

And now I wonder if this is something you have to experience to really understand. But I'd really rather not.