#tldr; i think its important to balance grief and catharsis

[chartedrights]

I just think that maybe. Maybe there’s so much more to this world than the life-changing moments and the horror of understanding that you’ll be alone forever and the menace of the apocalypse hanging over you. I think the world is so much larger than alien spores and eldritch deities and paramilitary organizations which routinely slaughter civilians to cover up disasters and androids and terror and death and fear.

We think of these as the big things. We think of them as the things that define characters. But really they’re the things that make good stories. They’re different and interesting and sad. But Hatchetfield continues to exist the other 364 days of the year. It exists in summer and spring and fall and winter, it exists on lazy Saturdays and Thursday afternoons full of homework and Monday mornings that taste like coffee and rain. Hatchetfield exists at 2 am when you’re sneaking out to get slurpees with your friends at the 7/11 and it exists at 4 pm when you’re walking home from work and everything is a tired bleach-pale yellow and it exists at 11 am when the world is still dew-damp and chilled with waning possibilities.

Hatchetfield is as full of people on days when nobody dies as it is on days when everyone dies. Community college students, retail workers at the Lakeside Mall who are saving up for college, kids who go to the arcade and kids who go the playground to pretend they’re superheroes or princesses or detectives or ghosts. Hatchetfield is full of parents and nurses and lawyers and office workers and reporters and baristas and optometrists and authors and biologists and librarians and community organizers and artists and bakers and electricians and people who are none of those things but used to be and people who might be in the future. It’s full of siblings and children and aunts and uncles and friends and lovers and acquaintances and coworkers and people you’ve never met but still love with all your heart.

Hatchetfield is a tiny town across a lake from Clivesdale, with a forest and an amusement park and a boating club and a mall and a movie theater. There are people there who like Thai food and don’t give to Greenpeace and people who like musicals and eat hot pockets every Tuesday. People who like the color blue and only read the classics, as well as people who heard Nature Boy and it changed their whole life. There are people who have never seen a whale, who have never been to a desert, who don’t know what Coatimundis are, who like caramel Frappuccinos, who drink chai tea, who like seeing ivy on brick buildings even though it’s bad for the integrity of the bricks, who cried the day they graduated from high school.

The vast majority of the world isn’t life-changing in the ways we think things should be to qualify as life-changing. It’s small. It’s quiet. It’s joyful or boring or simple. Most of the time we live our lives in vague contentment. And that’s why things can be life-changing; they do not exist as constants, or in isolation. Events reverberate because they are drastic, because they are intense, because they are different. What is there to change if life does not exist outside of that event? If the small, “unimportant” events have no meaning, then neither do the life-changing ones. What is loss if there is nothing to lose?

There’s more to the world than the end of it, and this I know- the end means nothing if the world is empty.