10. LOSING

People say that everything happens for a reason.

Which is technically true, I suppose.

But some of the reasons are too arbitrary to seem legitimate.

That reason doesn’t explain anything. It doesn’t explain how to prevent the pinecone from doing this in the future, it doesn’t explain what else pinecones do—it just raises a bunch of new questions that don’t have satisfying explanations either.

If you keep going, you’ll eventually realize that the one true answer to all your questions is: Of course it doesn’t make sense—what business do you have expecting things to make sense?

It’s a long process, but for me, the thing that started it was a bird.

My guard was down, and it came out of nowhere.

When your worldview gets T-boned by Birdhammer the Destroyer, you don’t necessarily realize what just happened. Because it hasn’t started spreading yet. You just feel… a little thrown off. Just a little. Like you saw something that was just a tiny little bit more than you know how to explain.

You can’t freak out, though. You aren’t some nimbo pimbo who gets tilted by seeing a bird. Nope. Not you. You can handle this. You should be able to handle this, GOD DAMN IT It’s just a fucking bird.

So you go to bed.

Then later, you’re somewhere.

Something is happening. An activity of some kind. Dancing, perhaps.

No big deal. You’ve done this before. You loved it.

So you’re dancing.

You’re dancing and dancing and dancing.

You’re really getting down with it.

You aren’t scared—you’re having a great time. But suddenly you realize…

All at once, you understand how ridiculous dancing is.

You wonder how on earth you missed every single one of the signs for 30 years in a row.

It’s humiliating; it’s deeply humiliating to enjoy something so obviously absurd for 30 whole years without even coming close to realizing how absurd it is.

You feel stupid.

You feel betrayed by yourself and the world.

You wonder, Why do I love this? Who the fuck came up with this? Did they invent it all at once or was it more of a gradual thing where nobody realized how weird it was getting?

This line of questioning irreversibly damages the concept of dancing. It’s useless now. You can’t explain it, and you may never be able to do it again without feeling too confused to continue.

Music goes next. Mostly due to its association with dancing.

And yeah: I have to admit, I love when it goes BWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA. I’m fucking crazy about it.

But that is ridiculous. It is ridiculous to love that. I don’t know what my reasons are, but I know they don’t make sense, and I question whether I should be allowed to feel this way about it.

After music, it was movies.

It might’ve been okay if I’d never thought soundtracks seemed normal, but, for my entire life up until the moment I realized how insane they are, I was under the impression that soundtracks make perfect sense, just like everything else in the world.

Unfortunately, the world doesn’t make sense. It just doesn’t. Not fully, at least. Not if you keep poking it. And poking harder doesn’t do anything. In fact, the harder you poke it, the less sense it makes. And once you start to notice this, it rips through you like a Tasmanian tornado octopus, rending your stupid little sense of meaning apart with its flailing power arms.

It’s a confusing type of sadness. Real, yet undeniably ridiculous. The same kind of sadness you’d feel after finding out that your mom is a sock puppet.

You want to go back to the way it was before, and it’s terrifying when you can’t.

You wonder what the endless aftermath will be like, and what percentage of yourself you lost, and how you’ll survive without it. You question whether it was fair for this to happen, and what can be done from here, and you realize how powerless you are.

Anyway, that was approximately the state I was in when the serious part started.

We’re gonna get into it a little. Hopefully not more than necessary. However, due to circumstances both under and beyond my control, there’s a lot of ground to cover. And it isn’t fun ground. I did my best to pare it down, but there’s no way to hide a sprawling tragedy sequence in the exact middle of something.

So we aren’t going to hide it. Instead, what we will do is insert surprising facts at regular intervals until you become acclimated.

Here’s the first one now:

It is now time for the serious part.

Saying that my health deteriorated would be like describing the sun as large; technically accurate, but it doesn’t really give you a sense of scale.

There were many symptoms. The main one was that I started spontaneously bleeding to death inside my body.

When you start spontaneously bleeding to death inside your body, nobody knows what’s happening. You just feel weird and go unconscious, and—

—and somebody takes you to the emergency room. And the emergency room says “We are very sorry, but we do not know what that is. Did you forget to eat for eight days or something? Or, like… maybe did you drink too much paint? Just tell us. You did something weird, right?”

That happened a few times.

Then one time, it happened even more than usual, and they were like, “Oh shit… yeah: you’re bleeding to death…”

And I said, “Why?”

And they said, “Who knows. You sure don’t have very much blood left, though…”

Over the following weeks, they put my body inside a bunch of crazy machines to check out what the fuck kind of practical joke it was trying to pull, and what they found was essentially a tumor fruit salad.

There was a plum-size mass, a peach-size mass, and a large number of grape-size masses. They estimated there had also been an orange-size mass at one point, but it blew up, and that’s why I almost bled to death inside my body.

Twelve days later, I underwent a seven-hour surgery at a scary cancer hospital where they inflated my unconscious body like a balloon and hung it upside down by the ankles on a wall table, because apparently that’s what needed to happen before the remotely operated claw robot could scrape out the tumors and remove half a dozen of my real body parts.

And I’m not trying to be dramatic, but that is an absolutely devastating kind of thing to happen when your philosophical structure is teetering on the brink of collapse.

It wasn’t cancer.

But, because of the tumors and the fact that my blood tested positive for something related to cancer, they’d told me it was anywhere from maybe cancer to probably cancer, so I prepared for cancer. I spent the weeks leading up to the surgery doing my earnest best to come to terms with mortality, and I don’t know how far I got, but I tried very hard…

And I guess it felt a bit silly for that to turn out to be unnecessary. On some level, I think I was hoping for cancer. Because that’s what I prepared for.

The publicity tour for my first book was scheduled to start a few weeks after the surgery. It was undoubtedly a weird time in my life to do something like that, but it seemed like I could probably handle it, you know?

After three weeks of that, I was so confused that I canceled Thanksgiving. A month later, I still hadn’t gotten over it, so I canceled Christmas too. Instead of going home to spend time with my family, I played meaningless games against a computer and didn’t get out of bed.

On New Year’s Eve, my little sister drove her car in front of a train.

She died instantly.

We’d always had a strange relationship, and I wasn’t prepared for it to be over. I don’t think either of us understood how much I loved her. It seemed like there’d be enough time to sort it out.

But we’ll never get to sort it out.

And I’ll never get to say sorry.

And I’ll never know why.

And that feels… really bad. I could go on and on about how bad it feels. When you can explain things to people who are willing to listen to you explain them, it is extremely difficult to resist fully and brutally explaining them. It feels good to explain them—like maybe you’re getting somewhere. Like maybe, if you can just… really explain them, the experiences will realize you’re catching on and stop bothering you.

It doesn’t work like that, but I still wanted to explain it, just in case—the emptiness, the awkwardness, the sinking reorientation after waking up from dreams. I even kind of wanted to describe the way it looked in my head when I couldn’t stop imagining the train hitting her. And not just describe it—draw it for you. If I’m being honest, what I truly wanted was to draw the whole playlist and show it to you in person so there’d be no possibility that you’d imagine it wrong.

I wanted to describe how violently my dad hugged me when I came home, and how much he was crying, and how scared I felt when I realized I would need to lead the family. I wasn’t ready to lead the family, but somebody needs to do that, you know? Somebody needs to maintain the family’s image of impunity at the village meetings. And my parents suddenly seemed too lost and small to protect us, so I assumed it had to be me.

I wanted to describe how frightening that was, and how inexplicably out of place I felt at the funeral.

I tried to keep it together so nobody would notice, and I wanted to explain how difficult it was, and how forcefully the sadness exited my body when I finally broke down during the closing ceremonies.

A family acquaintance approached us afterward. He said he had some herbs to help with my emotional volatility. I explained that I was just sad about my sister being dead—she used to be alive, see, and now she isn’t anymore, and it just really came through in the last part of the slideshow for me… And he gently pointed out that I’d been crying significantly louder than anybody else, which I felt sort of proud of, but also ashamed of.

I wanted to really go into detail about how awkward death can be, and describe the lack of closure and how it always just sits there, and the guilt, and the regrets, and which crossing it was, and all my guesses for what her last thoughts might have been, and how I still have dreams about her, but she acts different now.

From there, I wanted to go on to express how unfair the world is, and how many mistakes it’s possible to make even when you’re trying as hard as you can, and why I made the ones I did, and what they all were. I wanted to also explain what parts weren’t my fault, and tell you the full details of all my medical conditions, and how scared I feel all the time, and how familiar hospitals have become.

I wanted to explain why my marriage ended, and what I would do differently if I could, and why my parents’ marriage ended, and how cool it is that they’re still friends. And I wanted to ask all the questions I have that nobody can answer because they either don’t have answers, or they have too many answers, or it isn’t even super clear what the question is.

I wanted to explain all of it.

The whole thing.

Her whole life, and my whole life, and life in general.

But I don’t know how.

Sometimes all you can really do is keep moving and hope you end up somewhere that makes sense.