Oblivion

I just finished reading John Green's The Fault in Our Stars, and I can't help but sit back and feel like I've experienced a mindgasm. I mean, I know that I can be pretty deep and insightful at times (don't mind me, just stroking my ego a little bit), but after reading that book, John Green made me sound just about as deep as a kiddie pool. And you have to realize that, yes, it is the author who is deep. We often get so absorbed in the characters that we forget those characters only came to be because of the mind of a great writer. I feel like if I were to sit down with Green and have a cup of coffee at some hole in the wall cafe or a Starbucks, I would walk out of there 20x smarter than when I walked in. Yeah. It was that insightful.

The main characters in the book are diagnosed with cancer or have been diagnosed with cancer in the past, but what I loved about it was that it wasn't a book that gravitated around the disease. There were plenty of other small pieces to it that questioned and explored life, death, love, and how to deal with the whole spectrum of emotion, and throughout the entire thing, I could feel my mind exploding with in-depth thinking that kept peeling away layers and layers of thoughts about life that I had not even taken the time to really notice even existed. I can remember certain points in the book where I just stopped reading and pondered what Green was trying to get at or what he knew was there that needed to be revealed. Never before had I ever been introduced to such complex, insightful thoughts that seemed to dive into an ocean of their own, going deeper and deeper still until I found myself lost in thought.

What is death, anyway? And what is love? It has occurred to me that the more you love someone, the more apt you are to losing yourself once that person is gone. So when they're gone, where do you go? Where does that much of you just disappear to? I know that if I lost Shane, I wouldn't know how to deal with the pain. I could imagine myself lying on the couch in my basement in the dark, completely numb, ignoring the necessities of survival. And it makes me wonder just how much of ourselves we invest in other people. So many of us say we are living life for ourselves and that we can be happy by being ourselves. I've said before that I don't depend on other people because I can be happy all on my own. But that is also a lie. What are we without our relationships with other human beings? Sure, man himself could sit out in nature and enjoy all its beauties and riches, but if his happiness could survive on that, and that alone, then why did God create woman (so to speak in biblical terms)? If no one existed except me, myself, and I, sure, the pressures of meeting society's standards (or even a culture's standards, for that matter) wouldn't exist, which would make things a whole lot easier on my part. But how happy can we feel before our thoughts inevitably start to tangle and have no one there to help untangle them? We'd completely lose it. We simply cannot exist if we cannot find love and companionship in at least one other person.

John Green said in this book that pain demands to be felt, and I can't find any truer words than these. Pain demands to be felt. It carried weight when I read it, because so often, we try to mask pain. We cover it up and tuck it away so that we can save some face in front of people who care about us, because we love them, and we don't want them to feel pain. We create these facades so that we can go along in life not inflicting scars upon other people. But if we are not inflicting them on the people around us, we are only inflicting them on ourselves. Reading this book made me really question why we're so afraid to hurt. Love is hurt. We hurt because we love, and we love because we hurt. If we did not have anyone to love or to care for, we'd hurt from the pain of isolation and loneliness. But by loving others, we are risking the chance to hurt them for whatever reasons life decides to give us; things that we, ourselves, can't always control. There is no way to save face, in the long run, because if you hide it, you end up hurting. If you don't hide it, you end up hurting. But I think that love can overcome the pain just as much as it can cause it. If it hurts, it means it matters. And if it matters, then that means it's real. We question what love is all the time. We've been questioning it for God knows how long. We hear adults say we have no idea what it is, while we so deeply believe that we do.  And I think that to determine if it is real or not, you must know what it feels like for it to be taken away from you.

I understand that these thoughts of mine are most likely disorganized, because it is 4:50 a.m. and I have not chosen to go to bed yet. But I feel like these layers of thoughts are important ones, because not all of us take the time to recognize they are there, and we certainly don't take enough time to question them because we are afraid to feel them affect us in ways we do not wish to be affected. But the way I see it, if they make you feel something, whether it be happiness, sadness, anger, etc., then they must be thoughts that need to be addressed, correct? We are human beings that were created to feel. Again, speaking in biblical terms (although I find the bible to be a long history of telephone and hardly believe in half the shit it contains, no offense to any religious people), if our feelings didn't matter, then God never would have created woman. We need to feel in order to survive, which means that, yes, pain has to be felt and dealt with, just like any other emotion.

Hazel and Augustus (the main characters in The Fault in Our Stars) were well aware of life's cruelties, and knowing that they may end up hurting each other, they jumped into oblivion anyway, all for the chance that they may both end up happy so long as they were with each other. Life is about the risk, and about not knowing what will become of us, but being more than willing to sacrifice it all anyway for the sake of maybe coming across the kind of love and happiness that, even if experienced for just a second, is something real and extremely rare.

So many of us decide to walk on the sidewalk, but everyone knows there's more room for company in the street.