Existential Crisis

It creeps through my peripherals and falls into step behind me, shadow attached to mine like a leech. Rarely will I recognise it until it is so close I feel the weight of its presence threatening to crush me. Like an avalanche, it hits me. Smothering.

I can't breathe.

There must be something wrong with me to have such a poor relationship with the thing which follows all of us... or does it only follow me?

As a kid, the thing was embedded in my heart, eating away at me from the inside out. When it attacked, I could only feel my slamming heartbeat in my small chest while sitting through every bite it took of me. It was insatiable, and I had endless terror to give to it.

I still do.

All-consuming fear.

While it’s no longer a resident of my consciousness, it still follows me persistently. I am weak, always have been. Easy prey, I suppose. It only takes one moment of contentment or a clumsy nod to its source by a friend that my composure slips. Before I can recognise its grip on me, it's already happening: my breath is trapped in my lungs, my blood boils and pricks my skin, and my eyes are forced open wide, unfocused, staring into the abyss it pulls me toward.

Grief.

Have you ever grieved for something you haven’t lost, for an event which has not happened? From a young age, I have experienced the grief for my own death. The loss of myself haunts me, taunts me. Grief will drag me kicking and screaming toward a bitter end I foresaw from childhood.

Prophetic? No.

Pathetic? Maybe.

I stare into the eye of death and it stares back expectantly. When the grief hits, my awareness shifts. The person talking to me becomes an echo across an expanse of a water without reflection. A void. The light dies on the horizon as if the black lake's waters has reached out and snuffed the last candle. I can’t see my feet anymore by the water’s edge. My heart is gone from my hollowed chest. Beatless. My form belongs to the end. I am not welcome anymore, and my consciousness is sucked through an empty, endless spiral.

Death awaits me.

The mere idea of non-existence inflicts so much pain. People console me, insisting I won’t be stressed about death because I won’t know it has happened. With those words, the vortex rips my soul further away while my body sinks into the bottomless waters.

Their logic is flawed, because I know in my present moment. I know now that death will inevitably take me, and there is nothing I can do to escape the grief of my own end. I can return for today, blinking away the darkness, but it will take me again. One day, I won’t come back from it. My essence will be lost to the wind, my bodily form consumed by the depths, and all that will be left is this writing as evidence that I existed.

Unless....

Unless, of course, this is a collective human experience. When I am gone, the same thing will follow my children and if they should have the same experience as I do with this beast, perhaps that is evidence I lived. Perhaps the overwhelming despair which washes over me during these times is the emotions of every human past in their last moments, a collective feeling forming a lake of fear and grief. The drops of acceptance are nothing in comparison to the rest, and I will be another to join that blackness.