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

“One day, you are going to die,” Jeff’s booming voice echoes through the church. “Everyone in this room will someday be dead.”
I am chewing on my fingernails. I wish he had chosen a different topic.
“Look around,” he instructs. People stir in their pews. “Some of us won’t be here next year.”
A baby starts crying.
“It’s important to remember every day that passes brings us closer to the day that we die.”

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.