Monochrome

"I hope that someday when I am gone, someone, somewhere, picks my soul up off of these pages and thinks, "I would have loved her.""
-Nicole Lyons

"This book, when I am dead, will be

A little faint perfume of me.

People who knew me well will say,

She really used to think that way."

-Edna St. Vincent Millay

There's another quote that I can't make my brain recall exactly that talks about reading something and finding that someone else has had the same thought or feeling as you did and how it makes you feel like you're not alone...

And when I read the quote on today's page, it made me think of the quote above by Millay.

It made me wonder if I sometimes create things to leave behind me when I'm gone as a way to say 'I was here'.

I'm the only one of my siblings that doesn't have kids.

I'm glad I don't; I wouldn't be a very good mother.

But in a shockingly existential way, not having kids sometimes does make me question why I'm here and what my legacy will be.

It sounds so fancy and meaningful.

It doesn't feel that way.

It's just that it feels scary to be here and to live and then be gone and never thought about again.

I wonder if that's what people really mean when they talk about their legacy,

but they can't bring themselves to say it in that way.

And maybe that legacy can connect us to other people so that we don't feel alone while we are here.

Maybe that's why any of us do anything, in the long run.

Have kids, write books, paint pictures, become famous, become powerful, become monsters.

Because we're all scared to be forgotten.