Thank you, Marina Keegan

If you have not yet picked up a copy of Marina Keegan's "The Opposite of Loneliness", stop reading this and go do it NOW! 

If you are not sure who Marina Keegan is, google her story. It is sad, inspirational, and sad some more.

But one thing that I just cannot shake-- just how much Marina and I are the same. Not in looks, personality, writing techniques (she went to YALE and had a job at the NY Times. She was freaking FAB!), but in the way that we had a lot of the same thoughts and that she actually wrote them down. She has made me feel like I am not CRAZY! 

Do you sometimes feel like you are the only who thinks this, that, or another thing? Well let me tell you, you are probably NOT (there are other crazy people out there in the world just like YOU!)

Marina's "The Opposite of Loneliness" essay and her Nonfiction writing of "Stability in Motion" hit so close to come to me it is indescribable (but I am going to try anyways).

Marina did not know she was going to get killed five days after her college graduation, so she wrote "The Opposite of Loneliness" like she was going to live forever. She writes about how scared she was not to have the security of her friends like she had at Yale. "losing this web" and "this elusive, indefinable, opposite of loneliness." This is the feeling, she says, that she was feeling at that moment. Just days before her final breath, her last blink and sigh. "I plan on having fun when I'm old.", Marina writes, and speaks of "what if", "wish I'd" and "if I'd" topics. Things that we ALL have pondered many times. 

Marina goes on to write, "We're so young. We're so young. We're twenty-two years old. We have so much time." But the truth is, Marina did not. 

She ends her essay with "We don't have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I'd say that's how I feel at Yale. How I feel right now. Here. With all of you. In love, impressed, humbled, scared. And we don't have to lose that."

I mentioned earlier another piece of Marina's writing called "Stability in Motion". This is piece she wrote about her first car. Yes, her first car. She had this "relationship", emotional, with her first car. Call her crazy, but I am and was the same way. She describes this car in ways that you would think she had some weird obsession and maybe needed to go see a shrink about it, but it just shows that, to her, it was just about four wheels that got her from home to her best friend's house- it was so much more than that. 

This is how Marina lived her life and that is how I live mine. She had so much more emotion in her life than I would say the average person does. She felt everything and her imagination ran wild. She lived her life. She lived 22 years and she LIVED them. 

Her nonfiction stories are all different, weird, sad, awkward, and inspiring that you would not believe they all came from one mind. But they did and I want to thank Marina so much for this. 

Thank you, Marina, for having an ambitious, wild, fantastic, weird, truthful imagination. 

Now, I know that my blog isn't a "book review" blog, but if I inspired you to read her book, then great. If I bored you, then well, tough luck because you are really missing out.

We are SO YOUNG.