Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead

I’ve got it all figured out. We’re a parasite. Other animals on this planet coexist with nature. We don’t; we’re like scabies. Tiny mites covering the outer layer of earth, burrowing into it, infecting it. We are like tapeworm

I felt like I was never in the moment I was in. I was always looking back, or
worried about the future

I stare at my mouth in the mirror.

Smile, I tell myself.

Smile.

I read once that fake smiling can trick your brain into believing you’re happy, which can then spur actual feelings of happiness.

I gape at my smiling reflection. I stare into my own lifeless eyes as I grin manically at myself like a deranged chimp.

“How do I occupy myself?”
“I find I feel less anxious when I spend my time trying to make the people around me happier,” he shares. “Maybe you should try that.”

We laugh; we make involuntary sounds when we find things funny. Laughing is adorable, if you really think about it.

“What about you? What happened to you?”
I pause.
“I’m dying.”
He makes a face. “You’re dying?”
I nod.
He exhales. “Yikes. How long do you have?”
I answer gravely. “I have no idea.”

“One day I am going to die,” my internal dialogue asserts. That reality reverberates in my skull like a shriek in a cave. I am going to experience whatever it feels like for my life force to finish. Face it. Whatever animates my body will stop. Black. Nothing. That isn’t just some alarming scary-movie fear; it’s true. People will have to deal with my corpse.

I can’t get a pet because one day it would die, and I doubt I’d recover.

“Garbage is more lasting than people.”

There is a palpable silence.

I reach toward the coffee on the table. I pick up one of the white Styrofoam cups.

“I wonder if this cup will be on the earth longer than I will,” I consider out loud, while I struggle to pour myself some burnt-smelling coffee.

I’m pretty sure I captioned that photo “Me and my girlfriend (we’re gay).”