I picture myself on my deathbed, hooked up to machines, likely fading in and out of lucid consciousness, fairly often. I think about death a lot — not in an overly morbid way, but in one of those ways that prompts some critical thought and encourages you to appreciate your mortality. Every single time I imagine this scenario, I always imagine people around me, and it wasn’t until the other day that I actually took a moment to appreciate how odd that sentiment really is.

We’re brought into the world with a few connections — clearly, a biological one to our parents, siblings, extended family members, and so on. However, it’s always been the cultivation of additional relationships that just seems oh-so-strange to me. Social nature, at its core, is something that always manages to confuse me just a little bit — I mean, come on, I’m 20 years old and I can already imagine a handful of people at my deathbed and, if I’m brave enough, I can see even more at the funeral. It’s the lack of biological connection that makes it strange — how is it, almost by fate, that we manage to connect & empathize with these people who we otherwise have no connection to? How do we go home, lie in bed, and feel about them every night? It’s such a strange concept.

Fate is always what I resort to when it comes to explaining this, but even that creates more questions than answers. Think for a minute about how many unique people you come across in your daily endeavours — really think about that number. Every day, I could pass hundreds of people that I am blissfully unaware of. Whether I’m listening to music as a car drives by, walking through the halls of my school during a campus tour, or laying in bed at home as someone walks their dog down the adjacent sidewalk. How is it that, through some magical probabilistic distribution, we come to know each other?

How do we go from knowing each other to knowing each other?

I’ve always liked to find a brief bit of solace in something like string theory, platonic realism, and other psychological coping mechanisms ad infinitum*.*** A favorite of mine is the east Asian belief of the red strings of destiny, but even that feels like a copout. And I’m not talking about the extreme theories — believe me, you and I don’t need to hear another word about how Zeus split man into two halves, forever dooming us to a lifelong search — but just something that puts thought to action cleanly. Why and how do we go from creatures bound by biological survival instincts to people who handpick a few randomly selected mutual creatures as people to bond themselves to? Is that… too much of an abstraction? I just want a concrete explanation of how my life evolved from “wake, eat, cry, sleep” to “I’ve got conflicting social outings with 4 different friends and that in itself is enough to drive me crazy.”

I want to know why.

I want to know why I meet someone, seemingly by fate, and all of a sudden I’m sitting awake at 2 AM talking about everything & nothing all at once with them. I want to know the exact mapping that takes us from complete strangers to people who confide in one another. I want to know how I go from seeing someone walk past me on the street, having no emotional reaction to it, to seeing them sing or dance or laugh or cry, speak to a crowd or sob to a small room, show me their true talents or babble about their interests, all because of some weirdly twisted and intangible idea of fate.

I want to be able to bottle up that feeling. Cause I need a bit of it right now.

They don’t lie when they say dopamine is addictive. I realized just how much of my life I spent despising other people for things I’d eventually absolutely love & cherish them for. I want to know why some Darwinian evolution path made me crave hearing that person laugh or the conversations we’d have in a coffee shop on a random afternoon. And I’m not even talking about romantic, “will you marry me” love! I’m talking about the kind of love you feel towards those random people brought to you by fate who turn into the very essence of your soul, the “laughter is the best medicine and I’m the cure” people who make your life so goddamn enjoyable.

It’s in my nature. I want answers, I want results, I want outputs, and I want something I can bottle up and drip tiny drops of on my fingers when I’m feeling sad, lonely, or confused.

This is all pointless babbling, I get it. I’m sitting here, likely repeating the same things over and over, steeped in new flavors of metaphor every single time, but I really want you to understand that I don’t understand. I love it, and yet I don’t understand it.

I want to experience it every single day. That’s my New Year’s resolution. People ask me about what happened that turned me into the friend that seemingly knows random people everywhere, and this is the year I’m gonna confuse those people the most. I want to experience everything this weirdly chaotic idea of materialized fate can bring to me.

I want to love people more often. Again, not necessarily exclusively any of that lovey-dovey Hallmark stuff — though, admittedly, I’m a sucker for that too, but that’s a story for another time — but that feeling of love you get when your best friends reach out and say “let’s grab dinner or a drink and catch up!” I want that love where you sit and laugh in a coffee shop until 1:30 in the morning, tears falling and diaphragms cramped from too many subsequent jokes. I want that love where you sit around a karaoke microphone, belting your lungs out, or make snow angels in the middle of the night, and laugh as one of you slips down a waterlogged hill.

I haven’t loved enough, and that’s something I realize. I have found too much joy in the immaterial, or the uselessly material. All it’s taken is a handful of people, a handful of experiences, and a boatload of things I associate with feeling good to realize “man, this is the best legal drug that costs nothing but a bit of effort!”

And will I always be able to admit to this love? No. Whether it’s “hey, you’re gonna be my best friend” love or “I’ll get down on one knee for you some day” love or “call me when you get home safe” love, I won’t always know when it’s happening and I may just choose to play it cool and not admit to any of it. But know — please know — that I am a better person because of it. I am a better person because of you. And it’s all born out of a pursuit of knowledge.

I want to understand every single reason why, when I pass, connected to all those wires and tubes, I want all of those people in a room laughing, carrying on, and forging those new connections I once cherished.