Life right now is like a coin. It's all bright and shiny on one side, and on the flip side, it's dark and rusty. Or, to put it another way my piscean brain has liquefied, dividing itself into two bodies of water. There's the ocean of joy, and the lake of despair. The crystalline ocean is blue and sparkling. But the dark lake... well, it has its own murky appeal.

Let's take a little swim.

You must have noticed, if you've been paying attention, that I'm blissfully happy in northern California. This was, undoubtedly, the direction in which my life was meant to go. Both my writing and my performance skills are expanding and improving. My efforts to be a better person and a better friend are rewarding. I'm taking advantage of the biggest opportunity of them all: I'm living exactly the life I wanted to live.

But.

When I step back and think about my grandmother's death, I feel this void inside me. She is dead. She was alive and we loved each other, and then she got sick and she died. Quickly. So fucking quickly. It's easy to forget, living up here, that she's not down in Los Angeles waiting for me. I have to remind myself constantly: She's gone. She's gone. She's not coming back.

There was so much going on in my life when she died, I had to shut down a part of myself just to deal with it all. And now, especially on long car rides, or while I'm trying to sleep, I'm coming to terms with the void that her death has left in my life. And into that void rushes the awareness of my own mortality, a sense of dissonance that coexists with my happiness.

I'll tell you exactly what it is. It's that fucking bell, tolling for me. Because as much as I miss Grandma, the real truth is this: I love life so much right now, I can't ever imagine having to let it go.

Do things really happen for a reason? Is there really something "out there" that cares whether we live or die? Will I really see Grandma again, doing the chicken dance on some ethereal cloud?

If you look at it one way, the death of my grandmother and the breakup of my relationship contributed to my current happiness. It sounds callous, but I'm just being honest here. If my grandmother had not died, and still had cancer, I might never have moved. I might have stayed, because I wouldn't have wanted to move away from her. God knows I was scared to death before I moved here. I was full of doubt. Part of that was because I didn't want to leave Grandma.

And then there's Matt and I. It's a different kind of grief, a lesser grief; he's not dead, thank god. But if my relationship hadn't broken up, we might be having god knows what problems and fights. If we still lived together, he might still be unhappy, and hiding it from me. If we were doing the long distance thing, who knows what kind of stress I, he, and the relationship would be under right now? I wouldn't have this level of freedom. I doubt I'd have the same sense of exhilaration.

What if, what if. On the other hand, if things had turned out differently, my grandmother could be well and healthy, and my relationship could be coasting along blissfully.

I've had both thoughts. But the one I think the most is not, "Well, maybe this happened for a reason." It's: "My happiness would be complete, if only Grandma and Matt were still in my life. Fuck death. Fuck heartbreak."

Things happen for a reason. People say that. People believe that. But when I stop and think about it, it just seems naïve. Like believing in God, it seems like a fundamentally... well, silly thing to believe. Wishful thinking in the extreme. I know that's insulting to a lot of people, many of whom I respect. I know I could be wrong. I hope, above all else, that I am wrong. I hope there's some kind of plan, some kind of order, some kind of meaning.

I just doubt it very much.

It cheers me up that, as fundamentally as I believe the idea of the hereafter to be a big comforting lie, there are many people who believe that it's not a lie. I am outvoted by a lot of people, and they might all be right. I look at those believers indulgently, and enviously. I even wrote it in my poetic manifesto: "I don't miss faith, but I am jealous of it." Maybe they're not being silly for believing so strongly in some book. Perhaps it's more than a collection of fairy tales.

My philosophy class posited this: something cannot come from nothing. Consciousness had to come from somewhere. That "somewhere" is God. That's kind of an interesting philosophical puzzle in and of itself.

Then there's the miracle of the universe itself. Even seen from its most cynical, scientific standpoint, the universe is an amazing thing. Imagine all matter compressed into the size of a grain of sand, and the whole thing exploding with a bang. Surely, if THAT is possible, there is something bigger than that is possible too.

Either that, or the idea of the self is a delusion. The hope of life eternal is a delusion. Reunion with my grandmother? A delusion. Sorry. And in the same grand scheme of things, in that grand scheme that makes the universe such a remarkable creation, our own individual souls seem woefully unimportant.

I guess this is why I'm an agnostic. From the Greek, meaning "not to know" or, "I don't have any fucking answers here." I don't know. I don't have a pat conclusion for you, and such is life.

There isn't one.

"'We never do what we say we’re going to do,' I said to him. 'I have no faith in us.'"