Que Sera

Life is a roller coaster.

We all start out the same way, screaming bundles of DNA and neurons ready to be sculpted into a self aware conscious being.

We don’t know if it’s going to be a short life or a long one, happy or sad but we can guarantee it will be filled with challenges and triumphs, for one can not exist without the other.

Consciousness is interesting me at the moment. The marvellous way our brains learn and adapt, the power of our subconscious minds to fight for life when our consciousness desperately seeks death and how in the end it feels futile as we will all die anyway.

An endless cycle of birth and fucking and birth and death, over and over feels so trivial when the only thing that seemingly separates us from the animals is our self awareness of this very fact.

Perhaps ignorance would be bliss.

The only thing worse than losing your mind is the awareness of losing your mind and not being able to do a damn thing about it.

I knew this to be true for the first time when I read the second half of ‘flowers for Algenon’, and again when they were trying to diagnose me with MS, once more from the look in my father’s eyes after he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and I remembered how he’d made me promise as a kid to shoot him if he ever got “that blasted disease”.

At least I don’t have to feel guilty for refusing to shoot my father, cancer is taking care of that. He got the biopsy results and PET scan results back officially today, it’s “extremely aggressive” metastasised to bones, bowel and lungs. Treatment to ease the pain and he’s probably got 6months to a year.

I’m awkwardly numb to it, I should feel something but I can’t, maybe I don’t have a close enough relationship with him I guess, I don’t remember much about him from growing up, there’s a few stories I know, mental images of photographs of the things we did and places we went but no real memories, maybe that still belongs to another part of me.

So I take him to appointments and absorb the information, make plans accordingly, there’s a lot on, maybe I don’t have time to feel things.

Maybe we had made our peace with everyone a little too well before our suicide attempt back in 2015 and now we don’t need to hold onto that stuff anymore.

I just told my brother and still have to break the news to my sister – I don’t know how she’ll react, their relationship has been pretty strained for a long while but there’s a new kind of urgency to make some sort of peace with these things when life sets a deadline.