Pretty melancholy, honestly. I spent all day yesterday skimming through a Reddit thread of "seemingly innocuous videos taken right before tragedies", and they were invariably ones that featured people right before their death, mysterious disappearance, kidnapping, torture, or before they committed some terrible act of mass murder. Oftentimes these folks were kids. Hell, there was one that stands out to me, of actress on the set of Scarface having an absolute mental break after seeing a special effects blood pack go off, who ended up getting out of a car in the middle of nowhere and was never seen again. People say it was schizophrenia, probably aggravated by all the drugs that actors passed around like candy, but we'll never know for certain.
That was just a primer, however. What's really made me sad is noticing a souvenir we've kept over the years. I'm not sure if they still run it now, but a while back, Coca-Cola had this promotional campaign where their labels would say "Share a coke with <...>", the blank being filled with a common first name. Well, as my family's luck would have it, that was also around the time my brother's teacher (special ed) suddenly passed away in her sleep at home.
Such a kind soul. Always quick with a joke, innately jovial, and often a better mother to her students than the one they'd been born to. It's no surprise she was my mom's closest friend. As I'd been pondering the transience of our existence lately, seeing that bottle tucked away in a rarely-visited nook of the house, still pristine in the clinical glow of fluorescent lighting, triggered an outpour of emotion that kept me up all night.
Times like that, I wish life could be simple again.
