Annika Rose E.

Pereyra

BTLED 3-A

Arts in the Daily Living

Create your own piece of flip the beat.

- So, for my own flip the beat, I choose my favorite lines from my favorite book by
Hanya Yanagihara, which is “A Little Life”.

Things get broken, and sometimes they get repaired, and in most cases, you realize
that no matter what gets damaged, life rearranges itself to compensate for your
loss, sometimes wonderfully.

You won’t understand what I mean now, but someday you will: the only trick of
friendship, I think, is to find people who are better than you are – not smarter, not
cooler, but kinder, and more generous, and more forgiving – and then to
appreciate them for what they can teach you, and to try to listen to them when
they tell you something about yourself, no matter how bad – or good – it might be,
and to trust them, which is the hardest thing of all. But the best, as well.

It is also then that I wish I believed in some sort of life after life, that in another
universe, maybe on a small red planet where we have not legs but tails, where we
paddle through the atmosphere like seals, where the air itself is sustenance,
composed of trillions of molecules of protein and sugar and all one has to do is open
one’s mouth and inhale in order to remain alive and healthy, maybe you two are
there together, floating through climate. Or maybe he is closer still: maybe he is that
gray cat that has begun to sit outside our neighbor’s house, purring when I reach
out my hand to it; maybe he is that new puppy I see tugging at the end of my other
neighbor’s leash; maybe he is that toddler I saw running through the square a few
months ago, shrieking with joy, his parents huffing after him; maybe he is that flower
that suddenly bloomed on the rhododendron bush I thought had died a long ago;
maybe he is that cloud, that wave, that rain, that mist. It isn’t only that he died, or
how he died; it is what he died believing. And also I try to be kind to everything I see,
and in everything I see, I see him.