What defines the value of a life? When we see an animal dead on the side of the road, does it do something to you? What about your neighbor that’s struggling with addiction? What if there is a greater call above all of this?

A reflection on the term “best friends” and how it has been difficult for me to relate to that term. Does it hold too much expectation? Will it hurt me? Will I fail under it’s expectations?

To be free, I thought. 

My definition of freedom one day was this very thing. Riding in the back of a train car and not having anyone to answer to. My life could be what I made it. And the train would be my God. Strong, powerful, immovable. Fearsome, even. It could give and it could take away, as it had taken the life of one of the band members in a train-kid music group that I had enjoyed. As it had taken the leg of Chance, a friend I had met while at school.

In a few days I turn 28. And I’ve realized that it isn’t the way that the 2 and 7 fit together that made it my favorite number. It wasn’t the angles or the possibility of what they could mean. It is, for some odd reason, how 2 and 7 seem like an unlikely pair. They’re not both odds or both evens, their connection doesn’t make up a perfect prime number, and they don’t seem to fit well into many mathematical formulas, that I’ve found. They’re mismatched, of different value (in the natural as well as in my own internal value system [7 of course being the better of the two]), and quite frankly, no better than any other number in the book.