“They say that just before you die your whole life
flashes before your eyes, but that’s not how it happens for me.
I see
only my greatest hits. The things I want to remember, and be remembered for:
The time in Cape Cod when Izzy and I snuck down to the bay at midnight and
tried to catch crabs with leftover hamburger meat, and the moon was so fat and
round it looked like something you could sit on. When Ally tried to make a soufflé
and came marching into the kitchen with a roll of toilet paper on her head like
a chef’s hat, and Elody laughed so hard she peed a little bit and swore us all
to secrecy. Lindsay throwing her arms around us and saying, ‘Love you to death,’
and all of us echoing, ‘And even then.’ Lying on the deck on hot August
afternoons with the smell of grass shavings and flowers so heavy in the air, it’s
like you’re tasting them. The time it snowed on Christmas, and my dad split up
one of the old TV tables in the basement to use as firewood, and my mom made
apple cider, and we tried to remember the words to ‘Silent Night’ but ended up
singing all our favorite show tunes.
And
kissing Kent, because that’s when I realized that time doesn’t matter. That’s
when I realized that certain moments go on forever. Even after they’re over
they still go on, even after you’re dead and buried, those moments are lasting
still, backward and forward, on into infinity. They are everything and
everywhere all at once.
They
are the meaning.
I’m
not scared, if that’s what you’re wondering. The moment of death is full of
sound and warmth and light, so much light it fills me, absorbs me: a tunnel of
light shooting away, arcing up and up and up, and if singing were a feeling it
would be this, this light, like laughing…
The rest you have to find out for yourself.”
-Lauren
Oliver
