A sentiment so painfully true from the has-been Hollywood beauty to the boy who died before his day. Time truly is a fickle bitch. I blame the Moirai, specifically Atropos and her scissors. I finished John Green's novel The Fault in Our Stars today. Granted probably not the best thing to be listening to while painting pictures to hang in a baby's nursery. Note to self: go back over painting with some brighter colors maybe. The novel however was thought provokingly brilliant.When I think cancer survivors I don't count my self among them, I don't even think of myself as having had cancer. Even though technically I did have cancerous melanomas removed when I was seventeen, I even have the beautifully grotesque surgical scars to prove it. I did't even know I had it till it was gone, granted there was a number of non-invasive test to be done afterward to insure that was all of it. I don't see myself as having had cancer the same way other people survive, or live with cancer. At seventeen it did change the way I looked at the world. At the way I looked at life and death. Being forced to look the idea of my own mortality in the face as a teenage in at least a philosophical way gave me a very strong appreciation of John Green's very accurate portrayal of the internal conflict of looking at ones death at that age.
Like pretty much all of his books I laughed, I cried and I closed the back cover a better person. Maybe not necessarily morally better or even better in any literal sense of the word, but just more solidified in the way I saw the world. A better person for better understanding myself. Also like most all of his books it was a philosophical mind &*#@. Granted this post has accidentally turned into me just singing the praise of the great young adult novelist John Green and his literary sagacity, however I merely wanted to give credit where credit is due. At one point the narrator (since its first person she is also the main character) expresses sympathy and regret that this boy/girl (in an effort to not spoil anything I am being purposefully ambiguous, which is a side effect of life) is dead and is unable to make more memories or experience new things.
This is where in the novel I cried for the tenth time, which is saying something because as anyone who knows me will tell you I just don't cry. Except when I'm reading Anne of Green Gables, or The Brothers K, or The Harvester. I guess, well I cry a lot when reading books. However at this part I cried for a very different reason than why I cried at the end. At the end I cried for the characters, living and died, but at this point I cried for John. Not the author John ( I can see how that could get confusing). I cried for John the first man I really loved, though in many ways he was still a boy. The boy I met when I left home for college, the boy who taught the awkward, out of place, little girl that she was really a beautiful woman like her parents had been telling her for years. The boy who introduced me to the VlogBrothers, and subsequently introducing me to John Green's novels and Hank Green's musical absurdity, and brilliance (I still find Helen Hunt popping into my head like it has for years). At this point in the book however, I cried for John. I cried for the boy who thought to become some kind of hero, the boy who was already a better man then most, but wanted to prove it so much, the boy who wanted so desperately to make his mark that he went to war.
The worst part about Atropos cutting the string, isn't that every memory I make has a dark cloud hanging above it, but that it doesn't. I think about him everyday, and I don't remember a day since I met him that I didn't think about John. It doesn't stop me from living, doesn't stop me from dating new men, and hopefully falling in love with one, but it does shatter the rose colored glasses. I'd love to hate him. I really would, yet alas he left this earthly realm before I could find a fault in him to fixate on, for he had many. That is the crux of the problem he died before he experienced more of life (because no one can experience ALL life has, just more). That is why I cried, not because he lived, not because he died, but because my infinity was bigger than his, and his infinity was not as big as it should have been.
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