“I’ll fall, and fall, and fall, and fly.”

When at eight, you first fantasize about death, it’s like a dream. You feel you can make it come true, if you want, in the way you want it. So you wonder a bit more and leave it for another day, another moment, another thought, another feeling. Maybe you’ll discover a special mountain, a taller building, an airplane, a cliff.

Your dream, like any other, brews through your life. And then when in the last semester, everyone, but you, succeeds — the dream feels like an urge. Maybe the building round the corner is enough. But hey, isn’t there a dream of success much closer? So you chin up, cheer up and you know you’re good.

One day, what you thought was love, leaves you. Like you ever owned it, huh? Shattered, you try to gain perspective, “it happens..that’s how you’re supposed to feel.” Yet you slip, slide and land in the dark melancholy of being rejected. Now is the time to open your death book of fantasies. None of it is a dream anymore — there’s a monster calling to turn the easiest option into reality. You almost listened, almost planned, were almost ready to hop off that balcony. Yet a day later, you put it off. Perhaps the day was nice or maybe that new friend was kind. You take the bait, see the brightness on the other side and carry on.

Days are better, or so you think. You are following your dreams — the life ones. But who is with you? You look around and see nobody. You walk a bit, a few miles, into your class. There are so many of them — you talk, you try to connect, you say buh bye. Days go by, as you walk past the river, in search of a community, a friend, a flatmate, a conversation. You turn around and walk back to the bridge. Aah, you never considered a bridge drop into a river, did you? It seems clean and simple. And at last, you might even find some depth. You get to the first bar and then it hits you that there’s unfinished business, unpaid loans, unfulfilled promises. You carry on and ignore the bridge every day. At least your book of fantasies is thicker now.

You live on to be with those who always loved you. And as years go by, you find many more to love, to grow with, to be with. You stand together, in joy and with your book-of-death in hand. You’re so fulfilled that you tell death that if it came for you, it’ll find no regrets, no fear, no complaints.

You move on, once again, with nobody but a partner, holding nothing but memories. You know that your old friend grins in the corner. Loss, self-imposed loss, is a temptress for the prophet of meaninglessness, death. So where do we meet? In the air, water or crushed on the earth? By now, you’ve learnt to ignore the calls. Slow and steady and better than ever, you shut it out.

And then one day, you live the most beautiful version of yourself and the world around. You’ve arrived at one of the far-fetched points in life where you’ve discovered and fulfilled your own need to live a life in service of others. In attendance of your peers you’ve learned how to serve yourself; in the beauty of your friends, you’ve defined how to be yourself; in the pain of the stranger, you’ve grieved to wash off your own. And without a sense of anyone but you, you’ve felt the irresistible pull of the end of life.

This must be the hardest lesson to learn, you feel. And you march on, with a smile on your face, lots of space in your heart and rock-like will in your purpose. Your purpose — to love, to live, to love.

A challenge lies ahead and you’ll get to apply your learnings. Yet the reality of it drains you of every lesson, soaks you with many more and leaves you with nothing to work with but yourself. And a child. Everyone does it and so will you. But where is everyone? Where is anyone? Where are you?

In the emptiness of a beautiful house, in the absence of a place of service, and in the yearning to find joy in little acts every day, every moment — you lose your purpose.

Nobody feels it but you. You pep yourself up, not for a moment, not for a day, not for a season. You push yourself for over three years.

It’s been so long that you write without coherence, depth and experience to get a whiff of why you are where you are.

And so, last week, in the shower, you saw the book open up again. Only it’s not a book anymore but a page from it. And it has caught you naked. Naked on the surface, naked in purpose and naked within.

You’ve nothing to look after, nobody to care for and nowhere to go but that ocean on the west. You hold on to the water on your head even as the tears flood the shower panel. You look straight at the wall even though you can escape out to that ocean. You fill yourself with plans and ideas for the safety of your child, even though you want to let go of the guard of your own life.

You survive, this time. You wish you could do more than that — be alive.

And for that you’re screaming, calling out, to the whole world — none of us are alone and yet none of us feel together.

It’s like we all are drops of an ocean. The ocean has been churned out and we’ve all been spilled around, like drops.

What meaning is to a drop without an ocean to rise in, without a tide to fall back with and without the sun and sky to fill it?