All I Think About
It’s what I think about all the time. All day.
Being maimed. Being crushed. Being erased.
My father died when I was young, too young to really understand anything but the finality of it. He was here, and then he wasn’t. He was the strongest man on the planet, and then, suddenly, he was crushed to death. I wondered how a superhero could be crushed. From what I’d read, superheroes could carry whole buildings if they wanted to. How could someone as strong as my father fall victim to a random accident on a random street corner?
Dead on arrival.
Somewhere in my head, while I talk to my neighbor in the morning, I am waiting, waiting for a car to skid off the road and smash into me, ripping through my skin and flesh, severing my sentence. My neighbor goes on about the pain he’s been having in his back near his kidneys, and I try to pay attention. Somewhere up the street, maybe some nutjob hits a fire hydrant and the force from the water sends the hydrant through my skull, mid-sentence, mid-half-interested-nod.
It’s all I can think about.
I turned 28 last month. And that’s not so bad, I guess. Much of my friends are still alive, but the elders in my family are slowly, painfully dropping off. My mother bends a little too much now. My older brothers and uncles are all graying, forgetting, giving more and more time to long pauses and confused laughs.
“What was I saying again? That keeps happening. Old age…” And they laugh.
I think about their confused and slightly panicked laughter all day.
It wouldn’t be so bad if I knew what would happen. I could prepare for the pain, I think. My father had no time to prepare, no time to imagine the type of horror he would experience as he died. There must have been confusion there. Maybe he thought for a while, for a short and confusing while, that he would be rescued. That this statue, so much bigger than this gigantic man, would be moved. That his chest wouldn’t crush in, drowning him in blood, asphyxiating him. There has to be some kindness in that type of hope.
But that was a long time ago now.
My sister dies, and my mother, swelling day after day with agony, stops bending and starts stooping. She tells me to have children already, that no one is going to take care of me if I don’t get started. We transfer the house into my name, and I wonder when it’ll happen to me.
Maybe, one day at work, I’ll pick up a palette the wrong way, and the whole pile will fall on me. Maybe I’ll die slowly in the dim of that dusty, wood-filled warehouse, scrambling to crawl out of my own sinking lungs. Maybe someone will try to help me and be scarred for life, going over my ending in their head over and over and over.
I turned 38 last month. It’s not so bad, not until I start thinking about my yellowing eyes. My neighbor complains about his high medical bills, and I imagine myself turning to bones, alone in a hospital bed, my elders all gone. My friends are still mostly alive and, well, the ones that died didn’t die too terribly. This is around the time that the fun from our youth starts to transform into addiction. One by one, you watch the ones who couldn’t make the transformation overdose. You watch them drink until their body shuts down. You watch them fade away in club clothes and blurred nights.
It could have been worse, I guess.
The more of us there are, the more I wonder who’s next. Who will be swept away in a tsunami while on vacation? Who will trip over a broken piece of sidewalk and crack their head painfully against the pavement, watching their world warp and evaporate while their blood creeps slowly forward?
On the radio, on podcasts, in technology that I’m slowly starting to peel away from understanding, I hear about another celebrity dying. And this celebrity is a man that I used to think was timeless. This celebrity is a man I used to imagine in depressed daydreams, and I wonder, feeling too much nothing, if that means something. Another celebrity dies; this one a celebrity longer than I’ve been a person, and I wonder who is exempt from all of this.
It’s all I can think about.
My mother talks to me, and I flash back to what she was when I was smaller. It’s morbid, the warping that time sinks into our bones. My mother looks like a stranger to me sometimes and then I wonder what she looks like to herself.
I turned 48 last month, and you know, I don’t even understand how that happened. I remember picking my teeth in the mirror at 14, wondering when the braces would come off. Gargling mouthwash at 20, wondering when the acne would clear up. Crying my eyes out at my reflection at 25, wondering how much dirtier my job could make my skin. Whether my boyfriend was really going to take the dogs when he left. Pulling at my baggy, deeply black eyes at 34, wondering when my body started bruising from a lack of sleep. Every day, every day, I was somehow the same person.
I talk to my boss at work, pausing my typing, and all I can think about is how my hands tremble as I hold them over the keys. They don’t even tremble out of fear; I lost all forms of emotional fatigue and fear of authority at work long ago. My hands are just not able to hold still anymore, to quiet themselves.
I turned 58 last month, and you know, my father died when he was 29. My mother died this year, the victim of a car accident, and any hope I had of embracing my life and not fearing the randomness died in the car with her. She made it so long and still died on fire, in agony, crushed in on herself.
The aging doesn’t stop the worrying. My skin doesn’t even feel like real skin anymore. I have this distant memory of what skin, my skin, felt like, and it just doesn’t match up.
Talking to my young neighbor, I watch behind him more than I make eye contact. What will it be for him? My old neighbor had cancer. I watched him come out of the house every day, walk to the mailbox, collect the mail. Each day, he was closer to a new person, further from himself. I watched him until he didn’t come out anymore, until he was suddenly replaced by his son, somber and stunted in his agony, and then I watched him until the family moved.
You know, it goes so fast that I can remember thinking about this last year. Ten years ago. Twenty years ago. I can remember feeling my supple skin under my fingers and, as time went on, the skin turning to paper. The skin of my lovers turned to paper, turned to leather, turned to ashes.
I turned 68 last month, and I wonder, you know, how much longer it’ll be. It could be anything. I read online that people are dropping every day from bad water, from bad roof inspections that leave you sitting under a swelling, debris-collecting death trap. People my age have to worry about their hearts, their stomachs, their livers. My body is full of ticking bombs, all just waiting for me to eat too much or drink too much or find the audacity to fuck.
The things that scare me transform with every hair that greys, with every object that blurs a little more in my vision. Will it hurt? Will I regret not doing it myself, protecting myself from something so terrible that I won’t be able to comprehend it?
I turned 78 yesterday, and all I think about is death. It’s what I think about all day.
Being crushed. Being maimed. Being erased.
It’s all I can think about.
