We are born. We live. We die.

Of the above three, which two are counterparts?

There exist a plethora of phrases that put life and death in opposition to each other. I.e : "Life or death situation."I find these to be falsely misleading. I believe the opposite of death is birth. The act of dying is inversely related to the act of being born. Life has no opposite.

Where am I going with this.....

Well, those who know me understand my insatiable desire to make the most of everything. To live my life eternally optimistic & in love with all that life as well as the people & situations in it have to offer. I'm a romantic. I am a hopeless romantic. I am a thinker & feeler. I am rich emotionally & varied intellectually. In short, I truly love life.

In the past 6 years I have lost a girl I went to high-school with, my grandmother, 2 dogs, a best friend & now, most recently, a boy I was classmates with from 2nd - 12th grade. I've also lost (literally) money, a scarf, a few CD's, a box of to-go food & a pair of earrings. (That list is by no means exhaustive.) These are all parts of life. We all lose things. But it doesn't mean life stops. Sure, I understand the argument "death is the end to life." Right. But that doesn't mean that life & death are mutually exclusive. In fact, depending of what you believe - life goes on even after death.

My point in this argument is merely to say that in our human minds that are so ingrained in science, fact, biology & the proven - the act of being born is only matched by the moment of death. More so, life "exists" before the accepted birthing process even takes place. So death has no hold on life, in a way, it's merely a changing in form. A removal of the physical person but no necessarily the spirit. For you science lovers, matter can not be created or destroyed - only recycled. And that has been proven. Yes, yes, yes. I know that the spirit isn't tangible the way the body is. But something, life mainly, has to inhabit that body & I have a hard time believing it doesn't go somewhere even after a person's body has failed them. In fact, I would be inclined to say that life itself has no start or end. It's a continuum based merely on time & the way we perceive it. The way we understand our world - or are capable of understanding it.

All I know is, life is beautiful & carries with something special that only birth can attempt to capture and death can not take away. A few paragraphs above when I listed all the things I lost, those things are might be gone but the life that they carried is not. I still remember my friends, I still remember my animals. I still dream about them. In fact, I still think about my earrings (because they were literally, my favorite pair.) Life carries life. I am alive & I carry in me the life of those things that are lost to this tangible world.

Just had to get this off my chest : )