A Love Letter to Everyone

I read this book called The Hour I First Believed by Wally Lamb and it was amazing. I'd read it in high school but totally forgot the whole plot, but I just reread it, and it's just so good. It's about a fictional family who survived Columbine and the aftermath of what happens to everyone and chaos theory and all that. How one thing we do leads to another which leads to another. And how everything that happens in our lives is a direct link to something else that happened, something that is seemingly insignificant.

After I read this book, I started reading A Mother's Reckoning by Sue Klebold, that's right, the mother of Dylan Klebold, one of the Columbine shooters. It's the saddest thing I've ever read. She had no idea ever that her son, her "golden boy", who was a good kid and got good grades and never broke the rules, would do something so awful. And it's just fucking me up. Last night, I went into a deep Instagram hole while searching "Dylan Klebold" and it's just so sad, the depth of how much he hurt so many people, the senselessness of his actions, the torment he caused his family and so many others. And how, deep down, his mother loves him because he's her son, and she knew a different side of him, and how even though he did something so so bad and wrong, he was still..... a good kid??? It's got me so confused and fucked up in the head. But in this Instagram hole, I discovered people who idolize him and look up to him and have tributes to him and it's just like... yeah, he was a person who died and deserves to be grieved... but he also ruined so many people's lives and took away lives he didn't have a right to and just... how? How can we idolize that? Where is the line between respecting that he was a person who did good things and idolizing someone who was, at the end of his life, a murderer? Can we even say that he was ever a good person? Was he actually ever good? Should we remember the good things he did? Is he, at the end of the day, just a murderer? Does he deserve to be remembered as the person he was before?

Anyways, this book is fucking with my head and making me sad and I just wanted to express my gratitude for all of my friends and loved ones. I don't say it enough. We don't do anything alone. We don't achieve anything without the love and support of our friends. We can't do it alone, and we shouldn't, and we should tell people we love them when they are alive. Not only because they might, god forbid, get murdered any time, but because they might be the ones suffering. I don't know. I don't know what the point of this is. I just wanted to say that life is short and people are complicated and I love my friends and I am grateful for them even when I don't say it for months at a time. Who would I be without them? A lonely lamo, probably.