S for Sushi

I sit here typing this with ease. At my left hand is the remains of the sushi I just finished and a quarter of a baguette that will soon also find its place in my stomach.

It is rainy outside, beautiful, dark, and misty. The smell reminds me of home, just barely, the scent of fresh cut grass and rain is enough to send one through the tunnels of time and space to the first time we experienced such a grand and glorious smell.

I just went to see V for Vendetta for my third time and it occurs to me that perhaps I enjoy the letter V in the title of movies. My second place movie is the Village. Yet, as V so eloquently put it, "like God I do not play dice and I do not believe in coincidence."

Today I read for about thirty minutes purely for pleasure. It was the first opportunity that I have had in a while to do so and had the patience in order to do so. It was a book that Ian gave me. At first, I will admit, I could not read the book because it was about something that Ian wanted to do with his life. Something he wanted to do with his life, alone. It is about crab fishing off the coast in Alaska, the single most dangerous job on the planet. It would fill my eyes with tears to know that he wanted so desperately to perform jobs that could, with high probability, cost him his life. The last time I had to consider this was when he was working very hard to get into the United States Military Academy. He abandoned that idea when he realized that he had a life he could not afford to leave. I do not know if he will decide that he now has a life that is affordable to leave, or if he will decide that in the future. I only hope that his voyages would be successful and that he will live to enjoy his profit. I know that he would enjoy that sort of life very very much, and I wish him the most happiness I can with all my heart.

Every time someone hears a part of my life story here, at Creighton, they are taken aback. For a long time I remember Amanda Pena having angered me for what seemed to be a callous remark of the time, "If my mother died, I would not be handling it like you, I would be a total wreck." Now it seems that everyone says that. Robyn remarks it to me on a near regular basis. I feel as though I am some sort of new species, some discovery made along the way. I feel as though I am on stage yet have been given nothing to perform.

I have watched several best-friends die. I have lost my mother. At times I have been left on my own to care for my younger siblings. If this were a nation in some sort of peril, I would be an individual that others would turn to, others would be inspired by. I would be the leader of a revolution.

But these deaths and hardships of mine fall under the category of "coincidence" and are discarded like rubble by the side of the road. Here, I too am discarded and left to continue my life like everyone else, forced to forget these hardships because there is no place for them in the life I lead. How would it benefit others if I were to dwell on these fine lives that have ended before my eyes? How would it help for me to understand why I have been chosen to take hardships that those close to me, even my older siblings, were free to pass up? What good can come of my bad? There is none, and as such I forget what it means to have lived. I endure this world with a mask on. I am neither villain nor hero under the mask. I am simply dead. My feelings can no longer go deeper than the surface when it comes to my life. There is too much pain underneath that I cannot handle. That others, who love me with their entire souls, cannot handle. So I enjoy the surface and do not dare dive further because there is nothing to be gained from that attempt, for you or me.

So I say this today, if I endured what Natalie LouAnn Thomas More Rivera endured, I would be a wreck also. Luckily for us all, no one has to.