"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time."
-Jack Kerouac
We are all candles.
Our lives are short - a brief flicker of time and space and air. We are lit by our passions, our friends, are family – those that make us who we are. We burn for the ones and things we love, sometimes in gentle blazes of pale scarlet, other times in fiery crimson infernos. We burn and burn and burn, the intoxicating smell of life and canvas of faces and metamorphosis of night into day and dusk to dawn the only things that truly define us, shape us, make you you and me me. And then, the golden light flickers, wavers, grows smaller by the second before the last thing you see is dark and dark and dark (please turn the lights back on!).
These are things I am contemplating as the car whisks across the highway, the countryside turning into a blur of greens and yellows and blues that lose all their meaning the moment they are out of sight. The sky above is dark gray, but there is no rain pounding on the hood of the car. I bite my lip, hard, and draw out the coppery taste of blood.
This isn't fair – what, is anything fair? It should be raining and the grass should be wilting and there should be a thousand other clichés, the ones that happen in all those tragic love stories and soppy movies, but no – what would you expect in reality?
A cracked sob escapes from my throat, and I give a sort of half-gasp. The full force of everything has suddenly hit me, hit me like a pile of bricks being launched off a catapult at a million miles an hour.
My best friend is dead.