My Heart Will Go on?


Dear Eugene,

How much do we have to lose before we lose ourselves?

It's one of the questions I ask myself daily, usually half way up the hill.  When everything is happening around you, doing is mistaken for being, you don't pause and you don't ask.  You are too busy and occupied to afford an answer.

Any answer.

I suppose for some it takes no more than a wrong cut on his sideburn for him to go thermal-nuclear on his trusted hairdresser and with that years of friendship and countless words exchanged about life individual and the state of humanity collective.

Life is one heck of a tragicomic situation in search of a fairy-tale ending.

Imagine one day walking on a big street, big enough to contain all the people you've ever met in your life, with the ones you know the most (or you think know you the most) walking closest to you, and suddenly you just drop dead in front of everyone.

Thud.

Everybody turns around.  None surprised, for a person does drop dead one way or another sooner or later.  The question is: What would they say (mostly to themselves in their civilized head, of course)?

I don't think we want to hear those words.

We don't want to know the friends with whom we have taken a thousand vacation selfies will cry or even roll themselves in ashes for 40 days and nights but by the end of that joy will somehow restore in form of a vacation without us, a way to cope with life's many droppings that we would no doubt approve--with a smile from..."heaven"?

You don't want to know your toddler son, the one you worship and with all your mind and all your heart and all your soul lay him on pedestals, pretty much "got over you" in a matter of days and since then has grown to live with very little consciousness about your historical presence and even less gratitude towards the shiny altars of the past you've built for him.  He is in bad need of a vacation too and a memory of you does him no good.  Money you left in your bank account does.

My heart will go on, but that's a blockbuster not for this summer.

How much do we have to lose before we lose ourselves?  I am afraid the answer is Not that much.

Yours, Alex

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