The Lovely Bones

I wrote this on December 10th, 2005, at 3:33pm in Vail, Colorado, right after finishing a book by Alice Sebold called “The Lovely Bones;” its aftershocks are potent, and it is a book I highly recommend.

————

It shakes me heavily how someone can compose something so poignantly beautiful out of a story so horrifically tragic.

Life does not exist in separate blocks of happy and then sad, but these emotions are constantly juxtaposed, eternally vying for attention. My thoughts are forever torn between memories that stab like icicles and thoughts that make something inside me literally bubble with emotion, as if I may at any moment break into song or laughter or crying or some unknown, frightening combination.

Today, as life is starting (my sister is having a baby today — right now, actually), so also life is disintegrating as I, we, all grow older, some pieces of us fading to black and some lighting up with color in previously unexplored places.

And time; time is not our enemy but our healer — a disturbing, patient ghost that forever ties us together with infinite strands we call moments.

If we could only find a way to marry our atoms to the moment we’re living, I think we would find our life’s music in tune.

//