Aberrant Lucidity

In general, my advice would be "Don't have regrets." For the most part, there is very little I regret as long as I learned something from it.   We all have skeletons though that we'd rather not dig up ourselves, let alone admit to others. My advice for those is that you can regret them, but forgive yourself for them. I once knew this girl. We shared a bond (no, really), an experience etched in time spanning approximately 48 hours. It wasn't anything sordid; I was 14 at the time. You get to know someone pretty well when you're sitting next to them on a bus for 20 hours having both realized you helped save her life. When you're both 14 there really isn't that much to know.  She'd just gone through a traumatic experience. She had nearly died from dehydration and heat stroke. As I recall, she had lost her stuff when they took her to the hospital. My chaperone had grabbed a sleeping bag at random from under the bus and it happened to be mine. I

...except when it is. Aside from my "new age" belief in the right to die and my anachronistic notions of personal honor, suicide is never the answer. It has become apparent to me that losing a peer will never be easy at any point in life. The reason for this should be obvious; if one is your peer, then you identify with them. You can see your mortality in the end of theirs . It's not purely demographic as some circles tend to believe. I've lost plenty of friends who are not "peers" in the sense that, while we may have had good conversations and learned from each other, it was understood that we were just friendly strangers passing through each others' lives.  While there has always been some sadness in those cases, it was short-lived, stymied by the knowledge that their suffering had ended. This knowledge was realized through the profound (to me) statement by the Dalai Lama, who said (paraphrased) that he found it ironic that people celebrate birt