Bereaved

Disease debility and death.

That's what there is to look forward to from here on out.

I'd prepared something else to write about today, but I just got off the phone with an old friend from New York and now my mind is electric and teeming, full of frightening eventualities - a drawer full of knives.

He told me his mother recently had a fairly invasive surgery; that everything is okay but she has a pacemaker now. There is something truly truly horrifying about the thought of your parents dying, and of watching them. Not only does it serve as a poignant reminder of your own mortality, but it reinforces a looming sense of loneliness and despair - one that seems to creep closer with each day passing. To realize that one day, all you will have left of them is a fading memory, full of holes and inadvertent falsifications, existing as static snapshots of statues, gathering dust, interred in your mind.

We're all to be orphaned. By time and health and luck and wit, and life.

We're told to make the best of it, to enjoy life, to pursue happiness. We laud this as an inalienable right.

For these small pleasures we are willing to suffer great pains. But how our rapturous delights can beget so much distress; regret and penance, pain and remorse, a soreness that won't heal. We grab at roses inside bushes of thorns, forgetting that we must pull our hands back through where they've been thrust.

We fight to feel. It is all we have.

Why is it that exhilaration, the feeling of being alive, is so often followed by the dread of death. It tags along like a cute girl's fat friend. Sitting at the table, round and bloated, devouring space, expanding, hoarding mass. The fear spills itself out over itself, and anything near it, folding over folds. It affixes itself to our shoulders and we feel it in the crumbling arches of our tired feet.

Why must the idea of death be so terminal? It is a thing without magic, a kind of scientific disappearing act, cold hard and factual - final. Then is it death we fear, or the pain of death. Perhaps it is the same; less physical than it is psychological.

We don't care about the end of our bodies, we care about the end of our minds.