Before I got here, I thought for a long time that the way
out of the labyrinth was to pretend that it did not exist, to build a small,
sufficient world in a back corner of the endless maze and to pretend that I was
not lost, but home. But that only led to a lonely life accompanied by the last
words of the already-dead, so I came here looking for a Great Perhaps, for real
friends and a more-than-minor life. And then I screwed up and the Colonel
screwed up and Takumi screwed up and she slipped through our fingers. And
there’s no sugar-coating it. She deserved better friends.
When she fucked up, all those years ago, just a little girl
terrified into paralysis, she collapsed into the enigma of herself. And I could
have done that, but I saw where it led for her. So I still believe in the Great
Perhaps, and I can believe in it in spite of having lost her.
Because I will forget her, yes. That which came together
will fall apart imperceptibly slowly, and I will forget, but she will forgive
my forgetting, just as I forgive her for forgetting me and the Colonel and
everyone but herself and her mom in those last moments she spent as a person. I
know now that she forgives me for being dumb and scared and doing the dumb and
scared thing. I know she forgives me, just as her mother forgives her. And here’s
how I know.
I thought at first that she was just dead. Just darkness.
Just a body being eaten by bugs. I thought about her a lot like that, as
something’s meal. What was her—green eyes, half a smirk, the soft curves of her
legs—would soon be nothing, just the bones I never saw. I thought about the
slow process of becoming bone and then fossil and then coal that will, in
millions of years, be mined by humans of the future, and how they would heat
their homes with her, and then she would be smoke billowing out of a
smokestack, coating the atmosphere. I still think that , sometimes, think that
maybe “the afterlife” is just something we made up to ease the pain of loss, to
make our time in the labyrinth bearable. Maybe she was just matter, and matter
gets recycled.
But ultimately I do not believe that she was only matter.
The rest of her must be recycled, too. I believe now that we are greater than
the sum of our parts. If you take Alaska’s genetic code and you add her life
experiences and the relationships she had with people, and then you take the
size and shape of her body, you do not get her. There is something else
entirely. There is a part of her greater than the sum of her knowable parts.
And that part has to go somewhere, because it cannot be destroyed.
Although no one will ever accuse me of being much of a
science student, one thing I learned from science classes is that energy is
never created and never destroyed. And if Alaska took her own life, that is the
hope I wish I could have given her. Forgetting her mother, failing her mother
and her friends and herself—those are awful things, but she did not need to
fold into herself and self-destruct. Those awful things are survivable, because
we are indestructible as we believe ourselves to be. When adults say, “Teenagers
think they are invincible” with that sly, stupid smile on their faces, they don’t
know how right they are. We need never be hopeless, because we can never irreparably
broken. We think that we are invincible because we are. We cannot be born, and
we cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and
manifestations. They forget that when they get old. They get scared of losing
and failing. But that part of us greater than the sum of our parts cannot begin
and cannot end, and so it cannot fail.
SO I know she forgives me, just as I forgive her. Thomas
Edison’s last words were: “It’s very beautiful over there.” I don’t know that
where there is, but I believe it’s somewhere and I hope it’s beautiful.
-An excerpt from Looking For Alaska by John Green
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