The Opposite of Loneliness and Why We Need to do Things and do Them Now

It struck me, not at the end of the book, but while I was reading, that this exchange of words is something I want-need-must be a part of. It was The Opposite of Loneliness-Marina Keegan. She passed away a few days after college graduation and left her short stories, articles, essays etc. for her mourning parents, professors, and peers, to sift through, piece together, and construct. She left her mark on this world entirely on her own, she screamed out multitudes of important words, but they carried them to the electrical tower (she describes in the final pages) and allow her echo to radiate outward into the whole excisional universe. To put it more simply, she got her wish, she’ll be heard, she will be remembered, she will have her little piece of library shelves, desk drawers in college dorms, left at the end of a bed of some girl like me who was reading and thinking until her brain was ultimately too exhausted to process such admiration, inspiration, and motivation.

 

I don’t think everyone who reads Marinas book will hastily whip open a word document and go at it, but I do think everyone who reads it will do SOMETHING even if that something is just to change the way they think about a couple things, and that’s the point. I need to write because I need to do SOMETHING, I can’t just sit back anymore and let things happen. That’s what I took from it all. It’s true that we are young. So young. Like she wrote in her the title essay. And we are supposed to fuck up and we are supposed to have all the time in the world but the thing is we don’t. We have unlimited time on this earth in the life we are in now, in this place, with these people, with these interests and hobbies and crushes and dreams, and we will never be the same. So maybe we should be taking our time and going with the flow and falling into a disappointed regretful middle age, maybe, but probably not. I think we need to be doing things, now, and fast, and hard. We shouldn’t be waiting and putting things off because we have all the time in the world, we should be doing the opposite. And not because life is short but because its precious. Whether I die tomorrow, or tragically at 25, or to cancer when I’m 60, or old age at 95, it doesn’t matter. What matters will be today and the fact that I wrote this, that I did SOMETHING, that I otherwise wouldn’t have, and that many other people won’t. And for however many days I have left, I will keep doing something’s. Making things happen.

(JULY 14-2014)