can you ever really leave something behind

I watched a documentary on Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of China. In his era, China was broken apart in warring provinces. He was the first to unite the country and even gave it it’s name. In the process of unifying China, he left a path of destruction. He killed prisoners of war and ran his kingdom with the paranoia and power so common in powerful and flawed men.

Later in life, he became obsessed with death. I guess like so many people who fight their way to the improbable top of anything, the thought of descending again is unbearable, even if its in the most natural of ways. One line from the documentary really stung me though.

His obsession with death was in part because he knew he had sent so many people into the afterlife, and he was afraid they meant him ill. And if there is a Chinese afterlife or any after life where revenge exists, I bet they did.

But I guess what stuck with me is the way he plots relationships on his timeline. Often when people die, we think of them behind us, memories. Maybe for the pious, we think they left us behind. But the feeling is that of a past that can never be revived.

So its an interesting thought that what was once your past that you can never get back, could become your future that you cannot access or control right now. And it makes me think this:

can you really ever leave something behind?

I have leaving on my mind right now. I’m trying desperately to unstick myself from my time in Charleston. Its not a feeling of drowning, its a feeling of getting stuck on the starting block after the gun has been fired. My restlessness knows no bounds.

And yet, I know, covid willing, whenever I wake up for the first time in a new bed in NYC, I will miss all of this. And I will miss who I was here, and I will grieve for what I was to people and what they were to me and the knowledge that it will never fit again.

All the wars we fight with ourselves and each other, all the dopamine days, and the side sleeping nights, they don’t go silently into the blur of the past. They sometimes launch into the future.

I guess that as I get older I’m concerned with death in my own way, but more realizing that I don’t want to leave things poorly. That fear of retribution that Huang felt, I feel it too.

But whether you leave things well or poorly, you will, one day, leave things. Its an inevitably. To me thats why I really really try to keep a short leash on my bullshit. Its a constant exercise in failure but I do try.

I’d love an afterlife. I’d love a second chance or maybe to wish for more wishes. But on paper this is a one fight contract.

If you dear reader, or like me, you are a man or woman that is full of dead ends. We meander from home and we disappoint ourselves. We waste time, and have our time wasted. We are fools gold for some people. It all adds up like dog years.

My hope for you and for me is that whatever and whoever you encounter in the future or the even less knowable future future, that you can give and be given mercy. Extended to others and extended to yourself.