Chasing Nirvana

Twenty-one (Epilogue)

I walk along the cemetery quietly. The grass beneath my shoes is soft, the air whipping against my leather jacket is cold, and I am holding a bunch of odd looking, orange colored flowers in my hands. Birds of Paradise. It had been extremely hard to find them since we were now drawing into winter, but I knew I had to have them before coming here. I remember Jimmy bringing them for my mother when she came for dinner to our house. Freedom and faithfulness, that’s what the florist said the flowers represented. Kind of contradictory if you think about it, but Jimmy was a pretty self-contradictory girl.

I stop in front of a grey tombstone, where a miniature little stone angel sat atop, her wings blending into the engravings on the grey slab. I put the flowers in her lap.

“Hey, Jimmy,” I say softly. “Sorry it took me so long to come.”

And of course, there is no reply. I remember something she said to me that day when we were sitting on the bench.

“Nothing interests me,” she had said. “The world is a repetitive place. You’re born, you find a job, be passionate something, love and live and cry, and then you die anyway. What’s new in life, when everything between birth and death has been done by someone else at some point or another?”

I was too muddled by her presence to think of an answer then, but not anymore.

“It’s not about what they have done,” I say to her. “It’s about you. It’s about you experiencing something for the first time. It doesn’t matter if ten million other people had done it before or none. It’s about you falling in love. It’s about you feeling something that had been felt by everyone else, but in a different manner because you’re different from them. Everybody dies but no one dies the same. We are born and we are changed. Is there another Jimmy in the world, whose thoughts, whose experiences, whose emotions are the same as you? I didn’t think so. Even in the same circumstances, our thoughts are different.”

The place is silent. I think she hears me. I love you, Jimmy Jacobs.