Sooner or later, something will happen to everyone that will make them hate that people have to die.

For me, it was later than most. It happened at the end of my teens.

My grandfather (well, sort of) and I were taking a walk together, along with an old friend of his from the civil service. This was in the closing days of the revolution, so you'd still see spouts of unrest every so often. By chance, a gunshot went off at a protest a few streets over as we were crossing the road, and a few horses got frightened. People were pushed around.

Funnily, what I remember most vividly about the moment is how utterly undramatic it was. He stumbled, not in the quick, decisive way you'd expect, but instead rather slowly and meanderingly. It looked as though he was going to catch himself. I recall the thought that went through my mind: 'Oh, this isn't serious. I don't need to do anything.'

Then someone bumped into him at an unlucky angle, and his head cracked against the pavement.

And then there was shouting, many long conversations in which I said very little, and, eventually, a funeral. The day they held it was perfect and sunny, and by the end, the black dress I wore stunk of sweat from hem to neck. And many, many people spoke to me about how it wasn't my fault, despite me never suggesting otherwise.

My grandfather had already been on his last legs. Dementia had been rotting his mind for years, and he lived as a ghost of his former self, embarrassing at best and terribly destructive at worst. But though the events that followed his death had far graver consequences for me, something in how small the event was lingered. It made me wonder, for the first time, if there was any narrative to reality at all.

It made me feel afraid. Not of dying, but of all my actions and experiences being empty and profane. Neither kind or unkind, nor even productive or destructive. Only events, objects bumping into one another.

And, like so many other people before me, I started to wonder.

Was this really the only way that things could be?

Or might it be possible to alter the nature of the world, and attain something truly eternal? To instill a meaning that could never be lost?

From then on, despite everything I conceptualized myself as wanting, I think what I was really doing was seeking an answer to that question.