What John Green Taught Me

And I don't think it's a good thing. WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR THOSE OF YOU WHO HAVE NOT READ LOOKING FOR ALASKA AND ARE PLANNING ON IT. IT ALSO BRINGS UP DEATH A LOT. YOU'VE BEEN WARNED, AND CAN'T GET MAD AT ME.

I'm on the last twenty pages of Looking For Alaska, by John Green. I can't say that the character of Alaska is one of my favorites, or even the most well developed, but she sure as hell leaves a whole in your heart. I think she reminds me of the type of people I generally develop crushes on. They pick up lots of bad habits, exhibit moods of all encompassing joy, earth shattering depression, and there's nothing you can do to help them during the latter.
She drives off one night, and ends up killing herself by crashing into a car. It's the type of event that you see coming, but aren't prepared for even though you should be. After she's gone in the book, I can turn back the pages and look at when she was "alive," and I can try to forget that she had ever been dead.
This isn't the case for people who live outside of bound paper. A senior at my school recently died (last Monday, exactly a week ago), and it makes me think. He was not my friend, in fact, I do not know who he is. It makes me wonder about his friends, and if they ever turn back their pages and forget that his life will be cut short. I know I would.
I've only ever lost grandparents, but I've been with my friends through the deaths of their parents, siblings, and friends. Three of my grandparents died while I was alive, one about eight years before my birth. Nana 'Laine went when I was four, so my memory of her is more than blurry. Papa Latinik left when I was ten, and I have a clear memory of him. His booming bass voice, his house that smelled like stale cigarettes and valve oil, the way he loved each of his thirteen grandchildren more than he loved the New York Giants. Nana Jerry died when I was eleven, but she had severe dementia, really she died when I was eight.
All of these people were over seventy, and what would my reaction be if a close friend of mine suddenly went out in the same way that they did? What would I do?
And some of my friends have died. Not in a literal sense. None of them are buried beneath dry earth and woods. My friends have died in the same ways that ideas die. People change, families move, life goes on. In a way similar to Looking For Alaska, I find myself turning back pages, looking at old conversations and Facebook posts dated 2012. Somehow, I think that this will reverse their metaphorical death, that reading through "Dear Bridget's..." and "I love you's" will turn a clock around and draw them back to build a blanket fort and hold each other together. That somehow, staring at the freckles dotting her nose the summer of 2009 will take us swimming in the rolling waves of Ocean Park, Maine again. In reality, these actions simply make the longing and missing them more intense. My life is not a book, and I can't flip back to page one whenever I miss Olivia*.
Figuring out why they faded away seems to me just as great of a mystery as why Alaska drove away, and why Tom* died. I know that death is essential for life, and life essential to death, and whenever an old friend dies, a new one is born, but the hole of the old friend is never quite filled.
I wish there was something I could have done to stop her from getting into the car and driving away, but there wasn't, isn't, and never will be, leaving me with an open wound, patched by a band-aid friend, which eventually ceases to work.
Life is not a book, and that is what John Green taught me.

*Some names changed, some names completely made up