Soom Sha Gi.

I'm not sure how to start this post. I feel like it should come easily like my previous entries. Maybe something dramatic, sweeping, that in one single line of typed text explains everything, prepares the reader for what will be coming. Instead, I find myself out of words, out of ways to thrill and explain. So instead, maybe I'll write exactly how I feel.

Last week, a friend of mine passed away. Her name was Renee, and she was a beautiful, talented young woman who had a smile the sun was often jealous of. Many of you who I know read this blog will have heard and possibly known her yourself, and you know what I am talking about when I say the world seems to have a little less magic in it.

Since I was a teenager, I worked in an adult retirement and rehabilitation center. I've known death, which is likely to happen at any time to the residents who live there. Some I've known well, some I've found a sense of relief, some I've just felt sad about because death happens, and sometimes it happens to really good people. One of my coworkers passed away in an ATV accident, he was about my age now when he died. He had a son. I felt sad after, but it wasn't something that really changed how I moved through the world and how it seemed to me. I've had grandparents who passed away, but I was so young, that it didn't seem to really faze me.

So Renee's passing, sudden as it was, leaving me with a lack of closure, of understanding, is the first death I've really ever had to experience in my adult life. Someone I knew, someone I spent time with, loved, searched for hugs from, adored, and admired. It wasn't something explained, an ATV accident, old age, drug or alcohol abuse. It came from no where, and I don't know how to handle it. I know that all I keep doing is thinking about her, wondering if she's out there, pole vaulting into clouds, or if she's standing behind me, smiling as she reads me typing this over my shoulder. I wonder what is really in the afterlife. Is there anything? I suppose a lot of people question these things after someone they know passes, and I know I've wondered this on many separate occasions. It is partially why I want to be cremated and thrown into the ocean, so that if you have to spend your life in a hole in the ground because there really isn't anything after this, I'd rather nothing be gnawing on me, or me melting, or something weird. Gee, that seemed less morbid when I was thinking about it. I'd much rather float around in water for the rest of my non-life, perfectly content.

Yet Renee's death made me realize something else, and I'm sure it's probably coming to me a lot later than it usually does. I won't live forever, and I can't stay young. This feeling that my mortality is actually fact over fiction is in itself a bit of a slap in the fact I'd have not experienced. I like living in my little fantasy that I will be young, beautiful, and find a way to be perfectly happy. I'm not sure how to view the world now. I'm not sure how to handle it. I don't have closure, I don't have means to understand.

I just remember sitting in Tae Kwon Do after the weekend from hell, breathing in, breathing out, and remember Mr. Adams on Friday, sitting in class, attempting to meditate, while, unknowingly, the world I know is about to change, he says "take some time for yourself, maybe the only time you've had to do so today." So, on Tuesday, I do. In. Out. Soom sha gi.

Breathe.