This Is Heavy
I am afraid. Of many things. Were do we begin? I am afraid of death. I am absolutely terrified of it, of disappearing before achieving any goal at all. It’s happening all over, I feel, to so many people, people I knew, people I wish I knew, people I feel connected to because I watched them one time, in one game, as they fought their hearts out against someone I wished I knew, at a sporting event I once went to. I didn’t know them, but I did, in a sense, because everything about that game I held so close to me, everything apart of that sport is a part of me. And now they are dying, dead, they are gone. It happens every day, and it scares me to the bone. What happens after that, after you pass from this place to the next, whatever that may be? I don’t know. I don’t want to know. I don’t want to acquaint myself with that realm. I don’t want to know the endings of man.
I died once, almost. Several times. Once I drowned, if not for a fireman and his son. I would be dead at the bottom of a lake in Hawaii. I crashed on the freeway, skidding across five lanes, pouring rain and freezing cold, cheating death like it was a child that didn’t know any better. I spit in it’s eye. It should have been the end, but it wasn’t. What about then? Driving the fifteen north, alone, with a throbbing explosion of a pulse, thinking I would die alone on the side of a desert, a heart in dust, pebbles on the road. What happened then? I do not know. But death is a thing that frightens me more than anything.
And, as it is, with death where do you begin with the things you haven’t felt, the things you haven’t accomplished? I don’t want to die alone, unloved, unfulfilled, unknowing of what was possible, of what could have been. I cannot grasp this for the life (or death) of me. The riddle of life, the puzzle of living, of what it all means. I have no clue where to begin, but where it ends, that I do not want to see.
I don’t want to die without knowing what we could have been, what we could have seen. I don’t want to wish I were somewhere else, with someone else, wondering with my last few beats if I made the right decision, picked the right option, chose the right choice. So many variables of what are and what could have been. I don’t like uncertainty. I am Heisenberg’s nemesis.
But maybe what does it matter? Maybe fuck it. Maybe you do what you want, what makes you happy and if it works then fantastic, but if it doesn’t, well, maybe you feel better because at least you took the chance. At least now you know. Maybe that’s the key to it all.
The fact of the matter is this: three hockey players have died this Summer, three men of a sport that is embedded in my being. It is me. And even if I didn’t know them, I did. I knew how they played, I watched them in interviews, I knew them on paper, I knew them on screen. Three people I knew, but I didn’t. And then another, someone I knew, face to face, if maybe only in passing. But I knew him, from when I first picked the sport up, with friends, older than I can remember. I knew him. And now, at thirty, he is gone. Why it affects me this way I cannot say. But maybe it’s because I’m twenty-five and still out and about, outside of my head, wondering what the fuck it all is, what it is even all about. He didn’t have the chance to find it. I wish he did.
I am afraid of the future, afraid of what comes, what can, and what will be, afraid of sharing that same future as that man that didn’t get the chance to really live. I wish, like every man and woman and child who never had that chance, that I can experience that. But I can’t see it, I can’t see that future…and it is scary.
I do not want to die without love, without being love, and I do not want to pass on, fade away, without seeing what I can possibly achieve, what I (if anything) am truly capable of. This is not a ramble of some neurotic, depressive uncontrolled person. Everyone deserves a full life, but I am afraid of mine, if it will be even full at all. To those gone before their time, and to those gone before they even realized the concept of time, it was not fair, and wherever you may be now I hope you are happy and at peace and living your dreams out in the stars and the sky.
