When I Finished Harry Potter and Cried For James, Anna and Leslie, and Many Others

I sleep with my windows wide open because its comforting to feel that even though the world is dark and lonely, streetlamps are on to illuminate people’s ways on even the darkest of nights. Though I may be laying down, blanket warming me, and my head softly resting on a pillow, there are others that are still out there wandering, eventually, and hopefully, finding their way home.

We anticipated that life doesn’t end when the sun sets, and that life always seems to be more interesting at night, and thus we placed streetlamps on corners, along streets, to keep us from being lost. Its instinct, I believe, that truly prevents us from ever really being lost, because at every moment, and ever second we have been psychologically trained to survive. How did we ever manage to beat out the wooly mammoth or the saber-toothed tiger if we didn’t naturally just really want to live and see another sunrise?

This need, this constant and never-ending desire to breathe, to find light, is what brings love into your life. It draws people into your heart, and not because we consciously strive to find people that will guide us and help us, but because it is what we have done for thousands of years. A person lost is not one that doesn’t know where they are, but rather one that has lost all hope of ever knowing where they are. You can never truly be lost until you admit that there is no way that you can find your way, and when there are people in your life that act as guideposts you can never be lost.

“No man is an island, entire unto himself. Ever man is a piece of a continent, a part of the main,” preached John Donne. He said this to the knowledge seeking people of the Renaissance, people whose life was being affected every day by new technology, new art, new music, new ways to wage war, new ways to cure disease, new ways to die, new ways to truly live. Isn’t that so similar to the lives that we lead now? Everyday we are exposed to a myriad of things that make us happy, and everyday we learn of things that make us infinitely sad. There isn’t a day that goes by that we don’t walk under the sun, and there isn’t a day that we don’t walk in the shadows.

Darkness. I seem to touch it everyday, and not in the ways that would seem most obvious, like realizing impending doom in the world, but rather within myself. Within us we carry an immense tolerance of pain and of happiness, but it is the pain that takes the greatest toll on us. You can drown in sorrow more readily than you can drown in the ocean, and yet we can survive. We can survive because light just seems to come amidst the major storms in life, and it just so happens that it can exist in the embrace of a friend, the kind words of a stranger, in the unbreakable bond between family.

This is what friends are. They are the streetlamps that keep you from being lost in the dark. Regardless of where you are and where you are going, they are there to keep you from falling off the edge of the cliff, crashing into a wall, or simply from succumbing to a darkness that could seem eternal. There is sunlight, sure, but when the night comes, rest assured that there is always light.

There is always hope. And so even as a child, when I was afraid of the dark, and now as an adult, when I’m afraid that the night will never end, I look at the lampposts and I fall asleep… because I am not lost, because there will always be a way to find my way home.