Knockin’ On Heaven's Door

I have been thinking about death a lot recently. Paradoxically, I have also been thinking

about life. You see, last weekend I went on a hike with my girlfriend. Well… the words “hike”

and “with” are a little malleable. My partner went on a run and I, as a member of a staunchly

anti-aerobic brotherhood, begrudgingly agreed to shamble behind. I kept up for a little bit but

soon her years of experience and her steady stride carried her from sight. My last glimpse of her

was the taut arch of her back before she rounded a corner and disappeared behind a dense line of

towering aspens. Like a good boyfriend, I continued to jog after her for a few minutes until I was

certain she could no longer see me, then I slowed down and enjoyed a leisurely stroll through the

forest. Eventually, I came to a fork in the road. One path worked its way up Mars Hill in gentle

switchbacks while the other barreled headlong towards the peak of another hill I could not name.

I stood there for a few minutes, tentatively taking one step down one path before jumping back

and considering the other. It was a real Robert Frost situation if I have ever seen one. In the end,

I used my powers of deduction to definitively prove that because the second path looked more

hellish, that would be the route self-flagellating runners pretended to love. With total confidence,

I started down the second path.

I would not realize I made the wrong choice, let alone that I was lost, until much later. In

the moment my brain was too busy plotting a way up the hill’s steep incline to even consider the

fact that I had made a mistake. When I reached the peak, sweaty and slightly out of breath, I

threw a quick glance around to see where my girlfriend was. Atop the hill, the trees had thinned

out so I could see further than I had during the ascent. The trail continued to stretch out across

the peak of the hill to my right, but it was desolate and empty. I thought briefly about following
it, marching on until I ran into my girlfriend, but I quickly pushed this impulse away. I didn’t

want to get lost after all. Instead, I found a large rock and sat down, content to wait until my

girlfriend appeared from somewhere over the horizon. While I waited, I stared absently out over

the treetops and to the city beyond.

From my little rocky seat, I could see all of Flagstaff stretched out below me, every

aspect reduced to perfect miniature. But the longer I peered out over the slanted roofs and

congested streets, the less I was able to see. My eyes became unfocused, and the city blurred

together until it was nothing more than an amorphous blob of color and light. With no buildings

to latch onto, no locations to ground them, memories began to sputter past in uneven bursts.

Moments I had almost forgotten played against the backdrop of the dissolving urban sprawl. It

was mainly the good times. The quiet moments after a chorus of laughter. The lull as a song

fades. The warm buzz between rounds. The times when thought dropped away and quiet

gratitude was all that remained. But there was some bad as well. Projected in merciless mental

4K came a parade of my failures and embarrassments. Things I had tried hard to forget. I tried

once again to ignore them, but they ran on, interlacing with the good so that eventually they were

indistinguishable. Like the city, the memories became unfocused and soft. They ble[1] d into

each other, edges rubbed away until all that was left was a swirling mass of emotion.

Then I blinked and when I opened my eyes the world had snapped back into place. The

buildings stood tall and distinct, their bricks and plasters easily distinguishable from asphalt

veins that snaked through the city. With the physical once again firmly established the memories

too began to fade, my brain much more concerned with what was rather than what had been. But

before the mental slideshow could completely dim, I saw one last image. It was more emotion

than thought, more instinct than memory. The simple understanding that cities are nothing but
abstractions. Physical vessels we use to bottle our memories. And soon the memories I made

would disappear.

At the thought, I instinctively raised my hand cheek and began to rub at the stubble that

carpeted my jaw. That is when I began to think about death. Not death in the grand sense, not

death as the final answer to life’s great question. A smaller death. A death from which you keep

living.

It was then that I first realized that this life was coming to an end. In a matter of weeks, it

would all be over. Papers would be submitted, grades would be finalized, and farewells would be

made. Flagstaff would trudge on, but the memories I made would no longer color it. The town

would live, but I would die. Graduation was not a celebration. It was a funeral. One final act of

remembrance before the memories I made would be scrubbed clean and forgotten. With the good

and the bad buried beside me, I would die.

But then I would live. Someone had decided that I was ready to be an adult (an awful call

for a number of reasons) and before I am even cold in the ground, they will hoist me up and

thrust me forward to be reborn in the world of hard finance. My new life would begin far from

Flagstaff and the swirling jumble of memories that I had made. I would remember them fondly,

but eventually, they would wither and grey slowly supplanted by new experiences until even I

forget to mourn the person I had been.

I expected to cry, for my heart to race, and my blood to boil. But it didn’t. Instead, my

heart panged a single solitary note before returning to its regular rhythmic beat. Surprised I

rubbed my beard again before standing up and surveying the hilltop around. I wasn’t sure how

long exactly my emo moment had lasted, but the sun had dropped much closer to the horizon and
the shadows were beginning to melt together into an undefined pool of black. My girlfriend was

still nowhere to be seen. I turned once again to the path ahead, its dirt trail stretching endlessly

into the great unknown of the gathering dark. I took half a step towards it before looking back in

the direction I had come. The trail had almost vanished beneath the shadows, but I could still see

the lights of Flagstaff glittering in the distance. I stood there for a moment, once more looking

over the city. In the early dusk, the lights had blurred into each other, an indistinguishable ball of

brightness robbed of all the day’s sharp edges.

Not quite ready to live, not yet prepared to die I set off back the way I came.