Fri 12 September 2025

I debated whether or not this should be a "toot" (status update), or a proper blog post.

Like one time before, I am going to allow it to be something in-between. An off-the-cuff blog post, not quite as structured and agonized over as a proper blog post/article, but more permanent than an ordinary status/toot.

Watching the last episode of The Good Place... again.

(Third time around)

This time, seeing Chidi walk around his old neighborhood struck me much differently than before. I wasn't thinking about my mom or anyone else, but my own life. I was remembering walking around my old "neighborhood" (my old university) a couple years back when I went to VCFSW, which was hosted at my old Alma Mater.

I was remembering that feeling when nostalgia and remembrance gave way to the present and the banal, and my special day of nostalgia-tripping turned into just another day at the university, even though I hadn't been a student in nine years at that point. Beautiful sentiment was effaced and replaced with ordinary nowness, even though it was out of place (as was I).

And like Chidi I found myself wondering... what's next? What's left?

I'm... scarcely sainthood material, but I've done what I could in the past few years to live for the sake of others, and the one I had been focusing most of my emotional energy on is now no longer here.

So... what now?

I guess this is me unraveling one of the stages of grief. Until the past few days, I was unsure if I was even really in grieving at all. I felt fine. Relieved. A burden lifted, not that a person is ever a burden, but the burden of concern, of worry, the tight cage of emotional perturbation defined and constricted by a thousand eternal variables coming together over the span of years and finally all focusing in on a single moment.

All that suddenly gone, I felt... almost an elation. Not happiness, for certain, but a release.

And now that strange tightrope has gone slack, and I am left wondering where my footsteps should take me.

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