The stupid thing about death is that it doesn't really matter what happens next: life is a party and everybody's invited. And when you die, you're not at the party anymore. When they told me about death that was how I formulated it, and that's still the worst fucking thing I can think of, twenty-something years later. The whole system is stupid. I keep writing these paragraphs about that over and over and it just seems really whiny and selfish, but it's like: people are only dead, actually painfully dead, when you want to tell them something, to make them laugh or because it reminded you of a thing, or when ask them something, because they're the only ones that would know what you mean, or remember the fact you want to remember. The rest of the time they're just... drifting, like 90% of the people you've ever met, or even loved.

I've got people on Facebook I love deeply that I haven't talked to in five years, ten years, but the possibility that I could is implicit. If I wanted to get in touch with so-and-so from high school I could do that in a snap: that's exactly as far as relationships were meant to stretch. Which I love, because it used to be taking their number and never calling, which is more actively dismissive but something I'm hardly above. The possibility, the thought of them, alive, in you: that's something, because you can think of them a hundred times a day and know that you have the possibility of telling or asking them something, and often it is enough. They're doing the same thing. Your love is an alive thing that stretches from your body wherever it is, to their body wherever it is, and you don't even need to know those locations in order to feel that. But death says: no way. Death is a bunch of bullshit compared to Facebook.

Which is just one of the many ways death is tacky, because death also says: you know how you're utterly, irrevocably alone? You have an infinite number of doors inside you and every single door opens onto a singular, unimaginable world, and all you want is for somebody to step inside one of them and take a look around and feel at home there. For somebody to take a good sniff of that house and understand that it smells like you, and say that they wouldn't mind living there. You want to invite someone inside you, to look at all your bits and understand them, see them, hear the words you can't say; to look at the sparks inside your skin and know how alive they really are. And that is never, ever going to happen, says death.