To My Friends...

All things have to end…

All things must end, no matter how much we all would wish it otherwise, no matter how much we tear, beg and fight. The gods don’t care how much we pray or yell, we just get dragged away kicking and screaming in the end.

I think that perhaps it’s that helplessness that makes it so difficult. That intense desire to just have things stay the same, for stability, but the knowledge that change in inevitable.

My own impulse is always to hold on for too long, to not give up, to battle until I’m bloody and tried, until I’m lying on the floor my chest heaving for exertion and my eyes wet with tears, until I can no longer even think.

It’s a noble thing to end things when you know it’s time, I doubt I ever could. I know that I would wait until it was too late. I don’t know if I even realize that it’s over until it’s too late, until things have gotten so twisted that they cannot be fixed. Sometimes I wish I could just get out earlier, sometimes I wish I could keep those fond memories without the bitter, that I could have the clairvoyance to know when it was time to bow out. It’s a hard thing, no… a brutally painful thing to crush someone so close to you, to crush yourself, even when you know you have to.

But that’s just the thing… once you know you have to do it, there is no turning around. You stare down form the precipice, the pit of your stomach in your throat, your heart aching inside your rib cage, just knowing… Knowing that everything that once was is gone, that no matter what you do, nothing will ever be the same again. It doesn’t matter whether you want to jump or not, you know at that instant that you must someday, there is never any going back.

I remember it all too well, steeling myself for that fall, ripping myself away from what I was closest to, what I wanted the most. But I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t think, I couldn’t move without crying…and so I just stood there like a statue, both of us understanding what had to be said, what had to be done, what was inevitable. And those memories were the worst, because that’s what you’re really tearing myself away from, not the future, but the past. Those raw, throbbing memories, those happy, sicky-sweet, haunting visions that will some day be wrapped all neatly in cellophane, but are now demons, just rip at you until you can’t even move.

I could try all the clichéd old phrases in some vain attempt to have this all make sense, to try to explain something, but I know none of them will help. Who even wants to be helped when things are like this? All you want is to not feel anymore.

And so I just sit here, wrapped in the darkness around me, safe yet so vulnerable at the same time, thinking, feeling… imagining how you must be feeling, remembering, wondering. I wish I had some words of comfort, something to make everything better, to make it all make sense. But it doesn’t… it’s completely senseless. Even Camelot fell, Kennedy was shot, and the day succumbs to the night again and again until someday the world ends. So, I bang out this rambling nonsense, hoping that it will help on some level, even if it will only help me. Because, in the end, I’m not even sure who this is for… is it for you two? Or is it for me? Or perhaps it’s just for all of us… for humanity. I think maybe in the end that’s the only comfort in any of this, just knowing that we are all here together, separated by so much, but united in the fact that we all feel. We feel the sorrow, the loss, the remorse, and the joy separately, but also together.

That’s all I have, my shot in the dark, my attempt at understanding and my hope that on some level, someday I can be of help.


“And if you'd 'a took to me like
A gull takes to the wind.
Well, I'd 'a jumped from my tree
And I'd a danced like the king of the eyesores
And the rest of our lives would 'a fared well.” – The Shins, New Slang