Flip: I Got Dosed By You

October 28th, 2023

I always talk about knowing how a story ends before I start writing it, and of course this story ends the way all our stories end, with loss.

It’s funny that we don’t talk about loss as much as we should, because it’s always a good time to talk about loss.

When I watched the news on Thursday night, every segment was about murder, except the last one, which was about Taylor Swift. This week we’re dealing with deadly international conflicts and yet more fatal domestic mass shootings; today we lost Matthew Perry.

The tale of Flip is the tale of two real losses.

The first loss wasn’t of life, or at least not at first glance.

When I was younger, a girl we knew had a brain aneurysm. It changed her radically. Knowing other people who knew her, I watched them change, too. The idea that one day anyone could wake up and not be the person they were a moment earlier is terrifying and heartbreaking and haunting to me; it was then and it is now.

But it’s also a reminder to be here in the present, as I am. I read in a book recently the beautiful phrase “Everything is borrowed” and it’s something I think about every day. Nothing is ours to keep. Not even ourselves.

The second loss was of life.

I had a good friend named Tim growing up.

He went through it, in every way. He was always in and out of school, and he had to have major surgeries to keep himself alive, including a heart and lung transplant.

He was so optimistic it hurt, naturally funny, with the best taste in music. We had sleepovers and he drove me around in his car. He worked hard and he played hard and, on November 1st, 2007, at just 23, he died.

This death was also terrifying and heartbreaking and haunting, Tim living on borrowed time; like we all are, like everything is.

I would have dreams about Tim, and we would talk in them, and it was the only thing that actually made me feel better. I started to realize that even though I found no sense or solace in religion, I was still spiritual, and what happens to the soul matters.

I was out of control at this point in my life. All I wanted was to explore why.

If you’ve read Flip, you know how these pieces fit into the puzzle.

We’re all dealing with loss, at different levels, in different ways, all the time. For me, when I can’t deal, when the waves of chaos and uncertainty threaten to take me over, I just try to remember: nothing is ever really ours.

Everything is borrowed.