Should I be crying?
Why does one celebrity's failure to stay the course on earth affect me so?
People die every day. People engage in cruel, barbarous acts against one another. People slink along the edges of community and drop off into oblivion. Every day.
I didn't know this man. Any connection I felt to him was incidental and one-sided. The way he changed how I looked at grownups. They way his energy leaped and he was admired, the whole time I was shoving my leaping spirit deep because it was not admired. They way he was what he was, out loud, for everyone to see.
Except he wasn't, was he?
He was underground, too.
And I feel like, if our connection had not been incidental and one-sided, maybe he would have made it. He would have known he wasn't alone.
Which is, of course, the most ego-centric response possible.
Should I be crying?
If that bright spirit couldn't see its way to continuing here among the humans, I don't cry for him, I cry for us. For this world and all the blocked and polluted consciousness that is hurtling us towards a cruel, calculated starkness that might not be worth living in, after all. Is that what he saw?
Or did he see nothing at all?
My tears stick in my throat.
