I guess Wishbone is kind of a proof of concept. Like, he's a dog, but.

But it shows it's possible. And - for as long as we've known about the human afterlives we've known we had to do it. 

Settin' some real ambitious goals for yourself, there, man. But they're good goals. I guess.

I tried the thing where you go around living your life knowing that someone you care about is being tortured and I'd had enough of it for a immortal lifetime by about...day three.

Makes sense.

I've never really met anyone who was mad about hell before. I've met some people who were mad about death. Nobody else who was mad about hell, though, I don't think. Or at least nobody who said so.

I mean, they don't know, right? Like, maybe someone told them but that's not the same thing.

I guess. Maybe all the people who'd bother being mad about it don't believe in it in the first place.

There's that, but also - I don't even know if the people who say it believe it the way they'd believe it if you could go there and watch people be tortured, or the way they'd believe it if they'd met people who had been tortured for long enough and helped them kill themselves.

Maybe.

I used to get sad about it, when I was younger? But I guess it never really occurred to me that someone might be angry about it. Although I guess being angry about stuff doesn't occur to me that much in general.

Seems like it'd be hard to be angry about the same way it was hard to be mad at the Valar in Valinor.

Yeah. Maybe.

I spent more time with Oromë than I did with my parents. He loved me. He trusted me. He thought I mattered. I - I didn't expect to have to pick, right, but if you'd told me as a kid I'd have to pick him or my father someday -

Yeah.

That - makes sense.

Honestly half of what I'm sad about - well, not half, there's a lot of sad, but some of it - is just that I don't have - I mean I kind of have God? I guess? Taking care of Ender is better than nothing? But - I don't have him anymore, you know? And - I'm not really mad about that because, like, I know what the deal is, you know? But it bites. It bites a lot. Like - whatever else happened I was always supposed to have him, right? And I don't.

Yeah. And - it's not that I couldn't possibly have it back, but - I'd need to believe things I just don't really believe anymore. And that feels stupid, being sad about something you could have if -

Yeah. Yep. That's the feeling.

It - bites a tiny bit less having it named. I think.

It gets better eventually. Not all the way, but - some.

Yeah. Probably eventually. Being immortal probably helps, I guess.

Dunno. I think humans are maybe better at getting over things even if they don't have as much time for it. Probably being an immortal human is the best for getting over things, really.

Well. I'll report back if you get me the first half of that.

Everything still kind of feels tremendously incredibly horrible right now, but I dunno how seriously to take my likelihood-of-getting-over-this estimates because I have been told approximately a million times that teenagers frequently think the world is ending over stuff that they end up recovering just fine from. I have no idea whether that is applicable to this situation, but I sure have heard it a lot of times.

Teenagers also get trauma a lot. 

I guess. I'm abstractly aware of this but nobody's told me a million times.

I would not really go off the thing where teenagers who are upset usually recover fine but I think humans whose kids die usually do recover.

I guess.

Elves don't. Elves whose kids die usually die themselves of sadness. That's because Elves aren't really equipped to live in the real world, though.

I keep thinking I'm sort of prepared for the real world and then the real world keeps turning out to be way more of a mess than I thought it was. Like, in ways that are totally not connected to anything that I expected from the growing up process, even.