Floating Around

Upon reflection, I've realized that I spend a great deal of time in a terrible state of fear; over losing my brother and father, of homelessness, of maddness, of being left alone, of hurting someone I care about. That fear fuels my preoccupation with suicide. Death is the ultimate liberation from pain and sorrow itself, as well as the accompanying anxiety and fear that travels with it. Suicide represents escape, flight from interminable suffering over the long term or potentially from an immediate tragedy that suddenly makes life unworthy of being lived. It's an out. There's nothing particularly profound about any of this, but I confess that it truly amazes me how many people desperately want to believe that there is something on the other side of death. Every poll, survey, study or whatnot that I'm aware of has the vast majority of people believing in some sort of afterlife. Probably because they want there to be one. I panic at the thought, and the desire to live forever is so alien to me...I just don't understand. What if we really do have a soul and life, in a sense, never ends? Oy vey. And I'm not talking about eternal "life" in some funky scientific pantheistic sense. I mean consciously floating through time, and it never, ever ends. How rotten that would be. Like almost drowning throughout eternity. Getting just enough air as one gasps and thrashes about to go on living, but never finding peace in the deep, or comfort on the surface. That's how I imagine it, anyway. Struggling in the middle of a vast ocean, alone within oneself for all eternity. If I die, and then wake up in some sort of afterlife, I already know what I'm going to say, and it doesn't matter if I'm in Heaven or Hell or limbo or Des Moines, Iowa. I'm going to say, "Oh, fuck me...fuck me."

My existential nihilism is fed by my compassion. If pain is a part of existing then neverending life is an "all you can eat" buffet of grief. The ancient Greeks had the most horrific idea of what happens after death. They imagined that we all exist in purgatory in the afterlife, walking endlessly through time. Nice. I don't want any part of any of it. I think that speaks to my compassion for all living things, including myself.

What a fucking sad sack am I. I wish I had a Chunky.