Maybe that’s enlightenment enough: to know that there is no final resting place of the mind; no moment of smug clarity. Perhaps wisdom…is realizing how small I am, and unwise, and how far I have yet to go.
― Anthony Bourdain

It’s said that up to 60% of the adult human body is water. We arrive from wombs, are placed in arms, raised in cribs, twin beds, master rooms. We work the sedentary office job, start journals that are left half-empty, live under moons in noisy cities. We fall in love. We fall out of ourselves. We keep walking until our feet touch the sea. And that architecture—that 60% of oceans and rivers and puddles of rain—reminds us that we are made of everything around us. Everything is connected to everything else.

There’s a comfort in that—the tapestry of things. It tells me that I’m not hollow, that I’m not alone, not empty or random or floating. Sometimes I feel as though I am—this pendulum of sameness. In our ‘new normal,’ I log into work at 9 am, sit for 8 hours, get swept by currents of the day. I sometimes feel stuck, suspended in mid-air, not coming or going—just waiting, staying. I am still. I am treading water. Surely something more exists: a cottage at lakeside, emerald hills, fields of California poppies, peace. Like everyone else because of the pandemic, it has taken me two years to reconnect, to get to know myself again, to enter back into the state of becoming. In 18 months, I’ve found beautiful things, ugly things, things I didn’t know were possible. All of it has led me back.

I love the smell of air before it rains, the gentle pitter-patter of a shower in spring, the calm it carries. I love skyscrapers, the way they reach, their vastness, how small I am beside them because it means that I’m here and awake and moving again. I love photography, how photos freeze what all seems to be moving too quickly. I love sunsets, their endings of oranges and pinks and purples over darkening horizons. I love tea with honey and lemon, romance novels, Edinburgh, Scotland, oversized sweaters, large, Beauty-and-the-Beast-type libraries, free samples from farmers markets and Costco. Costco always meant unlimited snacks.

I love to write. That’s something that has never changed. But, it’s something I can’t say “thank you” to—no matter how many times I want to tell it: you saved me. Whether it was from myself, from my emotions, from how challenging and astonishing this life is, the simple motion of fingers to digital type, hand to pen prevented it all from drowning. Even still, it feels quite silly to give the role of hero to the inanimate, the unliving. I make life on, inside, around, from it. A blank page won’t answer, won’t text a reply, won’t judge or react or come with me to the shoreline. But, it did—every time—in its own mystical way.

For a long time, too, it was just sand and salt and surface. One of the hardest parts of the pandemic was its emptiness, its wrenching loneliness. You couldn’t sit next to a stranger on a park bench, chat about your day with the florist. You couldn’t be among crowds to feel less alone because there was no one outside. You couldn’t distract your thoughts because there was no noise, no volume, no car horns, subway music, waves. There was nothing. I was nothing—‘starfished,’ stretched, straightened, and sore. The pandemic made you feel like you were anchored to concrete. We have lived (and are still living) twenty-four-hour periods of rising death tolls, infection rates, variants, masks, six feet apart. Those same twenty-four hours that rotated like a windmill closed us off. Writing was the only thing that was consistently social in a bodega, lobby, garden, theater—in a world that felt like it had no people. Writing was the only thing that broke the glass, that started the music again.

In cities around the world—San Diego, Tokyo, Johannesburg, in New Orleans where it began in 2011 by artist Candy Chang—Before I die, I want to… is drawn in white chalk on the sides of buildings—public, community spaces of reflection, of mortality, of what it means to be alive, to feel as though life is unfinished, of what it means to regret, mourn, hope, crave, love, be. Now in over 5,000 cities and featured in Jennifer Niven’s All The Bright Places (book and movie), it makes me question what I’d write myself. I’ve come to realize that death is rarely spoken about—the reality that we are here and then we are not, that someday we will leave, be a shell, a body that doesn’t wake up. It’s scary. The pandemic has been another blunt, cold reminder that we all have an expiration date, that we only have a set amount of years. It has been another reminder that life is messy and unpredictable and sideways. Life doesn’t travel on a neat, linear line. It zigzags, skips corners, catches us in a riptide. Still, it keeps going—for however long it has.   

Before I die, I want to be infinite. If 60% of the adult human body is water, then 100% of it relies on living fully, with wonders and wanders, with joy and movement and being. 100% of you, me, her, us, them, we, him. 100% of everything at once—infinitely. I want to live as though time doesn’t exist, like each birthday isn’t a clock ticking down. I want all of the moments, kisses, dinners, writings, promises, secrets, hugs, deep loves to last forever. I want to feel like I am walking on water. Delicate, tranquil, and limitless.  

Before I die, I want to be without end.

– Jenna Seyer