Life is too short

This afternoon I walked over to CVS to get a few passport photos taken for various visas that I will need over the next few months. The guy that came up to the photo counter and took my picture was a tall, gangly dude in his early twenties. When I mentioned that I needed to get “visas for a few African countries” he asked me which ones. After I rolled off Rwanda, Ethiopia and Zimbabwe he started to list the African countries that he had hiked around. Startled (it's not too often that I find a fellow nomad in the USA or, to be brutally honest, one that is working the photo counter at CVS), I asked him which one was his favorite country and he replied Namibia. We spent five minutes talking about the beauty of Namibia, the flamingos along the skeleton coast etc., and then he paused and said: “Well, most people don’t think a CVS clerk would travel the world but I’ve seen a lot. Most Americans are afraid to go beyond this country.” I agreed wholeheartedly with his statement and he went on to say: “I know life is too short. I did two tours of Iraq.” I then said that I’d lost a couple of friends in Iraq. He looked up at me at this point, and I swear, I will never forget the haunting, lost look in his grey eyes and his reply until the day I die: “Yeah, I’ve lost a lot more friends, and that is why I travel. Life is too short. You are here and then you are gone. I know that now.”