Keianna

Certain topics have held my interest and played in my mind since I was a small child. One of the biggest being LIFE ITSELF. Sometimes I ask friends when they realized they weren’t immortal beings and get answers I wasn’t expecting. The responses that upset me the most are when a friend tells me that they lost someone at a young age, and were forced to wrap their heads around life and death when they “didn’t even understand how their Legos stayed together when stacked.”

In eighth grade, I read The Long Walk by Stephen King. The main character talks about how he understands the death of his fellow walkers but feels his own won’t happen during the game. I shut the book after reading that part and just sat on my bed simultaneously thrilled and terrified. I was thrilled that someone, even if it was just a fictional character, understood what I was feeling. I was terrified because the thought sounded absolutely ridiculous.

I let myself forget about the book until the end of freshman year. We had a late start and a few students would go by the middle school to visit their old teachers—something we were told not to do multiple times. We almost got caught so my friends and I snuck off the campus via the back door of the classroom belonging to the teacher who’d loaned me The Long Walk a year earlier. He didn’t remember me.

The book was still on the shelf as we closed the door behind us. As we ran across the still wet grass of the field we used to run our miles on, I kept thinking about how inevitable death is.

I’m a junior now, but I still feel at peace with that fact. ♦