Looking For Alaska

"Because you simply can't draw these things out forever. At some point, you just pull off the band-aid and it hurts, but then it's over and you're relieved."

"I'm not going to be one of those people who sits around talking about what they're going to do or become. I'm just going to do it. Imagining the future is kind of nostalgia. You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape it one day, and how amazing it will be, and imagining the future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present."

"Sometimes you lose a battle. But mischief always wins the war."

"It's not about life or death, the labyrinth."
"So what is it?"
"Suffering." she said. "Doing wrong and having wrong things happen to you. That's the problem. Bolivar was talking about the pain, not about living or dying. How do you get out of the labyrinth of suffering?"
"What's wrong?.."
"Nothings wrong. But there's always suffering pudge. Homework or malaria or having a boyfriend who lives far away. Suffering is universal and it's the one thing Buddhists, Christians, and Muslims are all worried about."
I opened my mouth again but this time not to speak, and she reached up and put a finger to my lips and said, "Shh. Shh. Don't ruin it."

You should love your crooked neighbour with your crooked heart.

Just like that. From a hundred miles an hour to asleep in a nanosecond. I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep. Not fuck, like in those movies. Not even have sex. Just sleep together, in the most innocent sense of the phrase. But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane.

..."Ya'll smoke to enjoy it, I smoke to die."

I found myself thinking about President William McKinley, the third American president to be assassinated. He lived for several days after he was shot, and toward the end, his wife started crying and screaming, "I want to go too. I want to go too." And with his last measure of strength, McKinley turned to her and spoke his last words: "We are all going."

There comes a time when we realize that our parents cannot save themselves or save us, that everyone who wades through time eventually gets dragged out to sea by the undertow- that, in short, "We are all going," McKinley said to his wife, and we sure are. There's your labyrinth of suffering. We are all going. Find your way out of that maze.

"Everything that comes together falls apart," the old man said. "Everything. The chair I'm sitting on. It was built, and so it will fall apart. I'm gonna fall apart, probably before this chair. And you're gonna fall apart. The cells and organs and systems that make you you- they came together, grew together, and so they must fall apart. The Buddha knew one thing science didn't prove for millennial after his death: Entropy increases. Things fall apart."
It applies to turtles and turtle necks, Alaska the girl and Alaska the place, because nothing can last, not even the earth itself. The Buddha said that suffering was caused by desire, we'd learned, and the cessation of desire meant the cessation of suffering. When you stopped wishing things wouldn't fall apart, you'd stop suffering when they did.

Because even memories fall apart, too. And then you're left with nothing, left not even with a ghost but with its shadow.

He was gone, and I did not have time to tell him what I had just now realized: that I forgave him, and that she forgave us, and that we had to forgive to survive in the labyrinth. There were so many of us who would have to live with things done and things left undone that day. Things that did not go right, things that seemed okay at the time because we could not see the future. If only we could see the endless string of consequences that result from our smallest actions. But we can't know better until knowing better is useless.
I would never know why she left, but not knowing would not keep me from caring, and I would always love Alaska Young, my crooked neighbor, with all my crooked heart.

I still think that sometimes, 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 she was only matter. The rest of her must get recycled, too. I believe now that we are greater than just 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 still do not get her. There is something else entirely. And that part has to go somewhere, because it cannot be destroyed.

...Energy is never created and never destroyed.

Forgetting her mother, failing her mother and her friends and herself- those are awful things, but those awful things are survivable, because we are as 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 be 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 our parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it can't fail.