The future is a place I often run away to. Especially so during times of stress. In my future, everything is okay. Things have worked out, I’m happy and healthy, there are no problems, no economic crisis, pandemic, or war. It truly is a great place to hang out. However, it is also not real, and that makes it dangerous. When I go there in my mind, I foresee it as though it is a predetermined fate which leaves me vulnerable to the reality of life – where ultimately that future will most likely not happen. I see a cute house with some land, I see my girlfriend with me. No worries nor fears to plague us. Then I open my eyes and see that she is leaving me. The illusion crumbles leaving a blank and terrifying future devoid of the love I imagined. But as unreal as my happy fantasy was, so is its counter fantasy. There’s only one future for us all that I’ve been thinking about recently.
Dirt and worms. When I’m done with my body it goes to them. They can fight over me.
While I nourish them, do you think they know the life that I lived? While the worm slowly works his way through my lower left leg, does he feel my nervousness in telling someone that I love them? I don’t think he concerns himself with the things I worried about in life. He isn’t thinking about how I was bullied at school. The worm is not thinking of any of these things, he is blissfully unaware that the food he is eating once had his hopes crushed, his dreams reduced to nothing but silly fantasies. He doesn’t know my disastrous breakups, loss of friendships, opportunities missed, and the people I let down.
Likewise for the earth that will ultimately absorb both me and the worm. Does the soil care about the wonderful times I experienced, the joys and unrivalled moments of bliss I lived through? When I become nutrients for the soil to absorb, do the happy times get transferred too? The great experiences, travelling the world, meeting incredible people, making friends from all different walks of life, the countless relationships I’ve been fortunate enough to have, the deep love I have felt that most people go their entire lives without truly feeling. The halcyon days of walking in verdant fields or basking in the sun within a clearing inside a forest. Will the earth know the joy of climbing that mountain in Scotland, surveying the boundless lands around us? As I become mulch from which life will surely further grow, what happens to that heavenly elation I felt upon being told ‘I love you.’
Like all things, my life will be reduced to cosmic dust. Everything I was, and currently am, lost to some invisible and inevitable foe. Does it diminish the things I’ve lived through? Does it mean there is no point to any of this? I don’t think so. It’s just a bit scary because our small animal brains imagine our lives as everything – there was simply nothing before and there shall be nothing after us. Therefore, if we start to consider that we are all going in one final direction we might descend into madness. I suppose that’s why we go looking for other answers, to protect ourselves from ourselves. There’s so much we will never understand though, maybe because there aren’t answers to these questions.
This brings me back to an older post I wrote, about it being better to not have feelings at all. When you’re hurting in the way I currently am, you’d be a fool not to consider even for a moment what it would be like to not feel this way. I cry randomly, I feel lost and alone. My heart aches and pulls within my chest, my mind races one moment and falls into a daze the next. Some nights I don’t sleep, I have nightmares and vivid dreams recently. I am irritable, my immune system is weakened, I stop eating. Incredibly physical reactions.
A close friend of mine told me she read my blog posts and related to them all so much, and that alone was enough for me to know I’ve done something good by writing about all the shit I’m dealing with. I’m going to keep writing in the hope that it not only makes me feel better, but also maybe someone else out there too.