You Already Knew

I had a friend from science high school who was top of the class, good at everything—literally maxed out.

After going to college, that friend posted on Cyworld every single day. Detailed, packed entries about who they met, what they did, where they went.
Back then I just thought it was some weird quirk of a genius and laughed it off.

But now in my mid-40s, suddenly those things my friend used to say came back to me.
That friend read a lot of books sitting at home starting in elementary school, and seemed to have thought deeply about death from way back.

The fact that people die, that life is finite and uncertain—that my friend was aware of this even in elementary school surprised me then too, but now that I'm in middle age and only just beginning to truly feel the weight of life and death, I'm struck by it all over again.

Only now am I starting to gradually record what I did each day, what I thought about.

Someday these small scattered notes will let me look back at my own life, become little and big milestones along the way, and give me the strength to keep moving forward.