Splash No. 256 - Range
Range
I don’t know if I’ve ever felt like I’ve experienced a full range of human experience in a given weekend, but this past weekend might’ve come close.
For most of Friday and Saturday, I celebrated my friend’s engagement—eating plenty and wishing the couple well in the next phase of their lives together. This couple has always felt like two perfect puzzle pieces, and it’s comforting to know that a relationship like that exists and will exist for the foreseeable future. It was a beautiful thing, with unbelievably great food that I couldn’t stop eating at a dinner and a gorgeous engagement party at a local wine bar patio.
Saturday was one of the nicest days I’d seen in San Francisco weather-wise, so after the midday engagement party, I went to park HTML energy meetup, which brought together various people who were interested in making websites as a creative act. In the beautiful Alamo Square, we sat on the grass as the sun moved across the sky and talked about everything from fashion to art classes. I probably met around a dozen people there and felt earnestly excited by all of them. I sought to learn more about their creative practices and to know them better and to maybe even collaborate with them. After nearly four years of living in SF and getting bored by the people I meet, it was thrilling to experience such a different experience. After the meetup, I was inspired to create a website to remember the day and capture a poem that I wrote at the park. It felt like I was bursting with creative energy. The world seemed larger and more accessible than ever, and I was equipped to explore it and build it.
And the next morning, I discovered that someone I had known in college had passed away. Although I wasn’t close friends with him, he had been someone I’d hung out with a few times, someone who appeared on my camera roll when I scrolled back to my sophomore year of college. On social media, I saw people I knew and appreciated grieving and wondered if I had the right to grieve someone who I didn’t know very well, other than the photos and the interesting conversations we had now and again. In the face of this news, I felt like I was in college again, but mainly in the feeling of being unable to cope with the world at large. I ate my feelings and thought about my mortality. I wondered if the shortness of life added urgency to everything else I was doing. I haven’t figured out any answers.
It just feels so deeply unfair for Jacob’s life to end when it felt like our lives were just beginning, that a few things could’ve been different and we’d all be on parallel paths towards happiness. As one life ended, new phases of other lives began, and that’s a cruel reality that underlies every great thing we experience. There’s always going to be good and there’s always going to be bad, but it sure sucks that that is the case. Part of me has the impulse to try and turn the sad things into something positive, but that feels wrong—a form of denial. My world is one person smaller, and that can never be fixed.
Drops of the Week
PLAYLIST - TECHNO HOUSE RAVE SONGS - really gets me pumped
ARTICLE - “The Scourge of ‘Relatability’” by Rebecca Mead - been thinking a lot about what makes art good, and that relatability isn't necessary a part of that
POEM - "A Boy Cries Wolf" by Logan February - really felt this one
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Still here,
Nikhil