Post Not-Quite-The-Third-But-Who's-Counting: Memento Mori

   Hello once more fellow lurkers of the wee hours and haunters of late night loneliness. Oddly enough when I'm not looking for more recipes for tea cookies or Finnish pulla; when I'm not rummaging about looking for some particular project I've just remembered from months ago; when I'm not playing the lute or crocheting up some new monstrosity - I guess I should put it simply and say "when I'm not keeping myself busy enough," my mind wanders. It can wander down many paths, some pleasant, most....not. Mine is a mind riddled with traps and pitfalls and treacherous neural footing along many pathways, even some of the most well trodden (perhaps them especially), that can snare my unwary consciousness in the morose quagmire of bitter memories, regrets, and all around depression. If I'm not careful I can find myself lost in its labyrinthine depths for weeks, feeling myself shrinking ever smaller as its ghostly monolithic walls slowly creep up around me, choking me, crushing my will to exist. Eventually I remember my way out, or in most cases nowadays I'm rescued by my Nathan, or by one of my other wonderful friends. Without them I may never have made it out, and I owe them my life at the very least.

   But more to the point. So as some of you may know, I lost someone incredibly dear to me a few years back. Actually I lost several somebodies, three to themselves, others to drugs (whether or not it was intentional, I'll never know), and others simply disappeared. We all came from bitter backgrounds,  shared a rather melancholic nature, shunned and were shunned by most (as gauchely cliche as it sounds) and  I'm sure these are the things that held us together as a group while it tore us apart one by one. What I'm trying to get at is loss, and lots it. More than someone of a mere twenty years ought to know. It become a part of me so thoroughly that I cannot look at something without realizing it's fragility, it's impermanence. I can't look at a friend without picturing their corpse, a city without seeing it as ruins, the world without knowing it must one day end. I can't even look at my beloved Miette, my precious little tortie kitten without the knowledge of her impending mortality biting at the corners of my eyes. This morbid tendency was something I would fight and fight for years. Even as a very small child I knew of death and it's inescapable finality. I wondered why my parents would so cruelly create something they knew would simply be destroyed one day. I knew that everything I did would be as forgotten as the innumerable majority of mankind who vanishes into obscurity within a generation or less. These realizations filled me with a a maelstrom of agonizing feelings - anger, terror, hopelessness - things no child should know.

   The loss of that special someone I mentioned cemented these feelings, put a face on that abstract heap of bad thoughts and etched its wretched mark on my mind and heart forever. I did things I regret, but it's the things I didn't do I regret the most. They're the things that always revisit me, pursue my empty thoughts and dreams like the Furies, chastening me, raking my soul over bitter coals and visiting upon me hells the likes of which the Old Testament would have been proud of. They're those nasty whispers that sometimes creep from the back of my head as I try to sleep.

   Walking around with these monsters eating at your heart and mind kills you slowly and painfully. I'd also like to take this moment to mention that I divulge all this not looking for pity, but rather to give context to what I'm about to go into - the beauty of loss. The incredible, awe-inspiring, all-around-you-all-the-time beauty that only tremendous loss seems to reveal. There's a certain aesthetic appeal in skeletons and trees in winter - in things that have had  everything stripped from them, revealing the stark and honest beauty of itself. As there is a beauty in these physical things, these ugly things, there is a joy in bitter loss. There are things beyond any words of my humble knowledge that only those who have lost can know. They show up in the smiles of widows, the laughter at wakes - a sort of poignant truth, a richer, fuller emotion than either joy or grief in their own right could ever be. It's odd but telling stories about our exploits and hijinks makes me laugh twice as hard now she's gone. It's more than a deeper appreciation - it's something I can't put words to, and doubt I'll ever be able to even if I were to live to see ninety.

   This overwhelming beauty in everything, the fleetingness that makes life that much more precious, the knowledge of being damned if you do or don't - those are what let me chase off the Furies of my regrets. They're the thoughts that pick me up as I'm being crushed by the looming walls of depression, the wings that fly me over the morass of woe-mongering and hopelessness that those foul recesses of my mind try to catch me in. They, along with all the other wonderful things and people in my life are what keep me going, what let me hope, what make me know that I will one day face death serenely and not fear it nor go rushing headlong for it. They are the blessing laid upon the curse of mortality, and for them, for that beauty, that fleetingness, and all the people alive and dead and yet to be born who loved, love, may one day love me, I am grateful.