My friend Nick's book metaphor for grief (8/29/18)

Thrusting one's self into a group of new people can be shocking, especially when you're used to intimate friendships. So far, I've found myself most comfortable when my new friends have felt safe being vulnerable with me. Although we are all excited to be here, most of us are grieving something back home. Many of my new friends are letting go of relationships or trying to put them on pause. There is ambiguity there. And as humans where there is ambiguity there is fear. I've tried to help pacify the anxieties by relaying my friend Nick's book metaphor for grief:

If we think of relationships as books, each moment a vignette, each vignette drawn carefully from the imaginative depths of our memory, then its conclusion is like putting that book on a shelf. When we think like this, grief becomes less morbid. 

You can have a favorite book and you can be sad when it's over. You can read slowly toward the end and pray a new/better/more conclusive chapter will appear from thin air overnight. More reasonably, however, you can rest assured that it will always be there to read again. And on the second read you can annotate. You can draw parallels between this story and the one sitting next to it. You can take some mental flicks and watch it back like a movie before bed for as long as you need to. And perhaps then there could be a sequel by popular demand. But we don't write a book the first time because we know there is a sequel. We can't know that. We can only know that we can, should, will write new ones in between.