Who does our lives belong to?

The year is 2020. 

The pandemic happened. 

Millions of people died - including some of your own family members. Your grandmother. Your aunt. Your oldest cousin's wife. Your friend's dads.

The year is 2020. It was so, so bad. Everyone just couldn't stop talking about please let 2020 just pass and welcome 2021 already. Everyone is exhausted and devastated. It was a very tough year for literally everyone. No one is spared. Except maybe Jeff Bezos? But surely he had his own nightmares too.

Something that you learned very well in 2020 is about how fragile life is. How it's probably just... a concept? How science probably can't explain how people retain their life and then lose it in a heartbeat. How your life is not yours.

Because when you're gone, it's not you who will miss it. It's other people you leave behind. Those who love you. Those whose lives you touched. Those who just didn't know how much of a presence your are in the world while you were still here.

You watched your friend went from that funny work wife to a person whose life leaves here slowly. She went from bright-eyed girl with bright future straight out of law school in Western Europe, to someone who can barely understand your words. This reminds you of your grandmother - who went from a healthy septuagenarian dropping wisdom every so often that you even wrote here about, to an octogenarian who had been laying in vegetative state for a couple of years before her life left her body. And you cried over it for two days.

This life - this entire experience, doesn't get better with age. It doesn't get easier as time goes by; you just learned that now, having spent 27 years on earth and 8 months of that mostly at home avoiding a highly contagious deadly virus. 

But that's the best - and worst - thing about time. It has complete disregard of whether or not you excel in things that happen in your life. It doesn't care how you are coping with it. It doesn't give a fuck how you are doing. It keeps going at its own pace. It moves on no matter how much you want it to stop. So no matter how you are doing in life... you are unlikely to stay in the same place forever. It will bring you somewhere. Maybe not geographically or physically - but you just won't be the same person forever. Because no matter how bad or how good you are in this life, time is bound to throw something at you. It's all completely up to you what to make of it - or what not to make of it.

I'm rambling here, I know. At the time you were writing this, you just watched your friend slowly disappearing inside the body of someone you know. It's the same body; a little different because it retains more water now, but it's the same. And yet you don't know her. You only know parts of who she is. 

She is disappearing, and you feel so helpless. You don't know what to do. Or how to help.

You want to cry, but there is really no very good reason to cry now. She is there. And you will be a horrible person to go ahead of time and think of the worst possible outcome.

You don't know why you're writing this, mostly out of worry and feeling guilty for think what you are thinking. You hope that when you read this again in the future, you remember how it feels to still care. To not lose any care in the world. To appreciate life again. To always, and forever, be grateful of the life you have.