Death, the Final Frontier.

Today.

Today I heard that there was a car accident on the road to my house. The house I grew up in, have lived in all my life, my safe place. A senior boy from my hometown was killed in that car accident while three of my little sister's classmates were injured. My little sister is distraught, my mother is terrified, and I? I am imploding with emotions. Everything I'm feeling is torpedoed inward and I have absolutely no control over the waves of helplessness, fury, and sadness that wash over me from time to time. Death is something I have had very little experience with. Having to deal with the themes of death the last few weeks, I thought of Annie Dillard's thoughts on death have been stuck in my brain; as well as Professor Sexson's question of "What's the point? Why are we here? What does it all mean?"

I've been asking myself the same question the last couple of hours. I have cried and laughed and cried again. It's odd, the strange floating feeling that death brings. It has the aftertaste of denial but the harsh reality of, well, reality. He's gone. He's never coming back. He will never hold his diploma or wife or grandchild. "What is the point?" rings through my head. I'm only 21 years old, how the hell am I supposed to know? Why the hell am I supposed to know?

I've driven that road more times than I could ever count, all my life, and I know it like the back of my hand. My little sister hit a deer this morning on the way to school. It could have been her. The death today could have so easily been her. Those S-Curves are notorious for being tricky, so why didn't they slow down? Why couldn't they have just slowed down? Why don't people EVER want to slow down? The obsession we all have to get from point a to point b is almost nauseating, like in "The Swimmer" to the "The Night-Sea Journey", we're all just catapulting forward through time and space but to what end? What is the fucking point? It was homecoming today, it was supposed to be one of the most exciting days of the year but instead, today has permanently been tarnished. Every homecoming from now on will be darker because a bright and promising soul was taken years too early.

It might be in bad taste to use this death as a diving board into my blog but so many points from class reverberated through my brain in the hours that have passed since I heard the news. Tomorrow I'm going home to be with my family and to comfort my sister, but I know that the questions will follow me wherever I go: What is the point?! To that all I know is that I will never know.