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For the Eight Grader
So, today a kid died at our school. Yeah, horrible, I know. It's weird. I mean I'm no stranger to death, and this has happened to me in a previous school. But then I was young and a bit of an idiot. Now I understand stuff. That kid, who I had never met, whose name I don't even know, will never have a job. He will never drive a car. He'll never have sex or even a proper girlfriend for that matter. He won't have children. He will never talk about the significance of the Battle of Hastings or write essays about the individual vs the community. He won't compare communism to George Orwell's 1984. He won't learn the Theory of Everything by heart, he won't have to stay until three in the morning to write about some stupid debate. He won't put his hand on the Bible and swear to say nothing but the truth. He won't learn that water is cohesive and adhesive and that in space it sticks to one like a weird jelly-like substance. He won't hear the “gotta split” atom joke. He won't call his boss a jerk and say "I QUIT!" with a rude hand sign waving in the air like a flag. All these things seem trivial enough while we're alive and surrounded by loved ones. We take them for granted, the bits and pieces of life. I'm writing this simply to order my bundle of thoughts and emotions, yet even this, writing, is something that kid will never do again. I'm not pointing fingers at anybody. I want to. I truly want to at a fundamental level. I want to know that it was someone’s fault and that that person truly intended for this to happen, I want that, because then I could find the f***er and beat the s*** out of him a million times and then that's it: done! But, naturally, it's far more complicated - there's no one to point at, no one to beat the 7 living Hells out of. It's just me, my phone and my thoughts on what a kid that I never met, whose name I don't even know, will never do. And to think, only an hour before I was worried about which electives I should take.
Maybe I still am a stupid little s***. I’ll never forget, though.
I owe the kid that much.
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It levels all. That's the shitty thing about death.