A Letter to Myself on My Deathbed
Perhaps awareness of one’s mortality is the first spark of self-loathing
As a child I feared you, fear as cold and hard as a stone from the river. I imagined your frailty as something monstrous, something otherworldly. All rotten gums and cavernous wrinkles, you were ruin and disaster, the vandal from the gloomy future come to slowly leech my essence, the horrible witch already haunting the bright red alleys of my young body.
I saw you on your deathbed. The bed was always white as mountain snow and I was always somehow looking down on you — myself — from above. Your death was lonely and peaceful, but the peacefulness didn’t seem to matter.
Sometimes this childish fear was tinged with hate, a hate that pulsed hot at the back of my throat. I hated you for your immutability, the way I knew you to be waiting for me no matter what shape my life might take, the way the ending was already written.
Perhaps awareness of one’s mortality is the first spark of self-loathing.
As a young man I envied you, oily jealously greasing my skin. I envied that you had made it through all the anxiety and bullshit of the everyday, the commuting and the bills, the mundane chitchat, tectonic ruptures and mass shootings, the runny bowel movements and melting…
