Occasional, Briefer Bouts of Mortality
Last night, after turning off the lights to go to sleep, I thought to myself “I will die some day.”
When I was a kid, I thought about this a lot — mostly during car rides, for whatever reason. I’d sit in the back seat, my sister dozing in a car seat next to me, and I’d stare at my hand. “That’s your hand,” I’d think to myself. “Your. Hand. That is you.” I tried to envision what it’d be like to completely not exist. I tried to define what it meant to be alive in the first place, to be myself specifically, my hand. The thoughts themselves were trippier than anything I tried in college, and I stopped trying to fathom them sometime in high school.
“I will die someday,” I thought to myself last night, for the first time in maybe ten years. “I will lose all sensation of reality, and everything will progress without me. Yes. This is upsetting.” Then I rolled over and went to sleep.
February 8th, 2009 at 9:27 pm
equally as freaky is the idea that at one point, you DID NOT EXIST AT ALL.
February 11th, 2009 at 2:34 pm
the comforting thing about impending mortality is that it (eventually) gives you a needed kick in the pants to do what you want to do with life.
February 11th, 2009 at 7:04 pm
Someone else did that??? I didn’t know anyone else was as contemplative about existence at age 7. We should have hung out as kids, Adrianne. We could’ve sat on the playground swing set and contemplated our hands. Given, I guess this is the sort of solitary morbidity better suited to car rides when one’s sister is asleep…. otherwise I suppose we’d be teased by the 1st grade Ryan Clays of the world.
February 15th, 2009 at 5:42 pm
I used to sit there as an 8 year old and trip out thinking, ‘Who am I? What am I? What is ME? WHO AM I?’. Then I’d go watch Jem or something.