Some people have such certainty in things. They are sure of
what they will do and who they will be and where they will go and how their
lives will end up. I’ve never had that. Sometimes it’s difficult for me to
believe I’ll even live through the day. I could never envision myself as
married, even when the date was set and it was all I wanted. And yet here I am.
I can’t envision myself having children and a family. And yet that’s what I
want. Hell, I can’t even imagine myself making it through this mandatory
overtime.
When I was in college, I didn’t try to picture the future.
Sure, I’d imagine graduating and getting a nice job (isn’t that a laugh?), but
I couldn’t picture it. There’s a difference between a daydream and what you
actually think your future will be like. But honestly, it never bothered me.
The future was an unknown: unknowable and potentially unattainable. And I was
okay with that. I was happy to live in the moment, to love the days I did have
as I lived them. At points I was sure I would die, and somehow that was okay
too.
Now I feel perpetually caught in the future: a visionless,
empty place. I can’t foresee anything happening as I plan for it to or even as
I want it to. I am consistently and almost constantly aware that I will die one
day. Of course, that’s a knowledge we all have. But I didn’t used to think about
it daily. I didn’t used to wonder what all I wouldn’t finish, what all I
wouldn’t get to experience before I left this life.
I am a soul too-well-acquainted with my own mortality. I am
a mind adrift in a sea of understanding.
Equal parts certainty and uncertainty govern my thoughts,
both negative sensations. Like the knowledge that I will die mixed with the
knowledge that I can never know when. The knowledge that I have so many things
I’d like to achieve and the understanding that I can never know if I will.
Hopefulness diluted with hopelessness, like the joy of a
thought, of a dream, drowned out by the crushing weight of finiteness and the
unknowability of my own future, by a nightmare of each instance that could
determine my hopes unwarranted.
“How do people make it through life knowing that one day it
will end?” Maybe that sounds ludicrous to you, the idea that death could be
preferable than the uncertainty that comes along with life. It’s a paradox that
only makes sense in my “especially sepulchral mind.” And even then it still
isn’t an entirely satisfactory solution, because the end result is ultimately
the same.
The thought of my own death is foreign to me and yet
familiar. Like the way you know a good friend and still learn new things about
them. Except morbid thoughts are less of a friend and more of a plague, a
disease in an already diseased mind. And yet somehow still comfortable. Like
the bad relationship you just can’t seem to leave behind even when it’s at its
worst, because the uncertainty of life on your own outweighs the negative
outcomes you deal with every day.
Thoughts of life are regularly tainted by the idea that it
will not be how it appears in my mind. And yet I don’t want it to be completely
predictable. I remember when I used to enjoy the unpredictability of life, the
spontaneity that came with it.
Would that I could enjoy it again.
Would that I could appreciate the nuances of life.
Would that I could break this cycle of depression.
