I think a fair amount about the fact that we're all going to die. It occurs to me at incredibly inopportune moments I'll be standing in a bar, having managed to get an attractive guy to laugh, and I'll be laughing, too, and maybe dancing a little bit, and then everything goes slo-mo for a second and I'll think: are these people aware that we're all going to the same place in the end? I can slip back into conversation and tell myself that the flash of mortality awareness has enriched my experience, reminded me to just go for it in the giggling and hair-flipping and speaking-my-mind departments because why the hell not? But occasionally the feeling stays with me, and it reminds me of being a child feeling full of fear but lacking the language to calm yourself down. I guess, when it comes to death, none of us really has the words.
I wish I could be one of those young people who seems totally unaware of the fact that her gleaming nubile body is, in fact, fallible. (Maybe you have to have a gleaming nubile body to feel that way.) Beautiful self-delusion: isn't that what being young is all about? You think you're immortal until one day when you're around 60, it hits you: you see an Ingmar Bergman-y spectre of death and you do some soul-searching and possibly adopt a kid in need. You resolve to live the rest of your life in a way you can be proud of.
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