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
bulid a small, slef-sufficiant 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 only 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. Sometimes
i still think that maybe "the afterlife"
is just something we made up to ease
the pain of loss, to make our tmie in
the labyrinth bearable. 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
experiances and the relatonships
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 part
of her greater than the sum of her knowable
parts. And that part has to go
somewhere because it cannot be
destroyed. One thing i learned in science
class is that energy is never created
and never detroyed. 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 face's, they don't know
how right they are. We need never
be hopeless, because we can
never be irreparably broken. We
think 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 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.
-M.H. (Looking For Alaska)
T0ri4nn