Spent last night in a friend’s hospital room. You do a lot of thinking in a room like that…
Everybody you’ve ever loved is going to die, and so are you, and you’ve built your whole life around not thinking about it. You almost have to. You couldn’t merge onto the highway or kiss someone goodbye in the morning if you were holding the odds in your head while you did it. So we tell ourselves everyone is solid, that the people you’ll see tonight will be there tonight, and you forget you ever made it up.
I’ve spent a lot of my life standing where that story comes apart. You don’t walk away the same man. It files the edges off everything you thought mattered, until you can’t remember why you spent last night angry.
A man drives a road he’s driven a thousand times. The thousandth time feels like the first nine hundred and ninety nine right up until it doesn’t, and the gap between an ordinary evening and the end of everything is a few feet and a couple of seconds. That’s what we’ve been living on without once looking at it.
That it held again today, that you woke up at all, that the people you love are still a phone call away, is more than you’re owed. You didn’t earn the breath you took this morning. You can’t put it in savings. Nobody tells you how many are left before they hand you the last one.
If you’ve lived long enough you already know this. You’ve gotten the call that pulls the air out of the room. No long life skips that door.
I won’t tell you to live like today’s your last. That saying has lost its weight. But you are in someone’s hands right now, whether you’ve made peace with it or not, and what you decide about whose hands those are is the difference between spending your borrowed time in quiet terror or in something that finally feels like rest.
The breath was given. Sit with that before you scroll.
Everybody you’ve ever loved is going to die, and so are you, and you’ve built your whole life around not thinking about it. You almost have to. You couldn’t merge onto the highway or kiss someone goodbye in the morning if you were holding the odds in your head while you did it. So we tell ourselves everyone is solid, that the people you’ll see tonight will be there tonight, and you forget you ever made it up.
I’ve spent a lot of my life standing where that story comes apart. You don’t walk away the same man. It files the edges off everything you thought mattered, until you can’t remember why you spent last night angry.
A man drives a road he’s driven a thousand times. The thousandth time feels like the first nine hundred and ninety nine right up until it doesn’t, and the gap between an ordinary evening and the end of everything is a few feet and a couple of seconds. That’s what we’ve been living on without once looking at it.
That it held again today, that you woke up at all, that the people you love are still a phone call away, is more than you’re owed. You didn’t earn the breath you took this morning. You can’t put it in savings. Nobody tells you how many are left before they hand you the last one.
If you’ve lived long enough you already know this. You’ve gotten the call that pulls the air out of the room. No long life skips that door.
I won’t tell you to live like today’s your last. That saying has lost its weight. But you are in someone’s hands right now, whether you’ve made peace with it or not, and what you decide about whose hands those are is the difference between spending your borrowed time in quiet terror or in something that finally feels like rest.
The breath was given. Sit with that before you scroll.
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