Someday soon, we’ll all be wrapped in linen and thrown on the fire.  As we hurtle through the blackness, the heat of our decimation a warm glow on our cheek, we will have time to think: what have I done?  What have I left behind?

I’ve stayed up late the past few nights, and slept late the past few days.  I’ve been watching movies, documentaries on astrophysics and cosmology, writing, and occasionally drinking.  So the brain, it does what it does, and it does it well.  Sending me careening through the darkness of my mind, searching for answers, identity, legacy.  Whathaveyou.

I talked to my dad the other day, for the first time in over a year.  He sounded tired, but I was glad to hear his voice.  When I asked him how we was aside from work, which seems to define him at this point in his life, he paused, filling the space with a long, awkward vowel, and then said “Okay”.  When I pressed him on that, he told me that he’s been struggling with high blood pressure in recent years, and it’s due to a hereditary condition that I can look forward to, replete with cumbersome medication.  Good news on a Monday all around.

I went home and told my wife, punctuating the tale with the playful refrain, “I’m going to be a burden to you in my later years.”  It seemed so silly at the time but now that I’ve ruminated on it, I wonder about its validity.  We met a psychic while we were in Las Vegas celebrating our anniversary at the beginning of the month; as she held my shoe in one hand and my hand in the other, she told me I would live to be 107 years old, but I should stop driving after 85.  Now, it’s no secret that I don’t see myself living to a ripe old age, and I’ve always had a premonition that I’ll die in an automobile accident, so I didn’t take much stock in her “prediction”.  Add to that high blood pressure and my already infallible work ethic (another gift from my father) and I can see myself diving headfirst into an early grave.  Or an all-encompassing fire.

I don’t have plans for December 22nd, 2012, but that’s not because I think the world won’t be there to accommodate them.  Merely a lack of foresight.  If the world does end sooner rather than later, however, I will shed a tear for all I haven’t done, or all I’ve done wrong.  I am a lousy friend; bad at calling, bad at answering when the phone rings on my end.  Out of sight, out of mind.  Sadly, that rings true for me.  I feel a deficiency of spirit that I can cling to someone so tightly for so long and then let them go the second a sliver of distance appears between us.  Maybe it’s due to being burned by death, or maybe I’m just a callous, soulless fuck.  The jury is still out.

I heard a line in a documentary the other day that went something like this: “Do you know why they always send young men to fight our wars?  Because they don’t believe they’ll die.”  I am not a young man, anymore.

Someday soon, we’ll all be wrapped in linen and thrown on the fire.