the September issue

Two weeks from now I'll be contemplating life from the other side of 21. Circumstances being what they are, I s'pose I'll be thinking more about age and time and maturity this 9/16 than usual. Hopefully I'll be too aged and time-worn and mature to condense them into simple equations and straightforward answers, à la Wiesel, though.

Things have been going really well, though. My worry-muscles are atrophying. Slowly. But—

surely.

I'm not thinking too much about school yet. I'm not working too much. I'm not writing but it doesn't bother me too much. There'll be time for that, to write and to un-write, for visions and revisions which a minute will, etc.

A few weeks ago I was hit for the first time by a fear of death. Those that know me know that I can be an uncommonly morbid person at times, but for some reason, the idea of dying never scared me that much, though. Perhaps my morbidity springs from a lack of fear. Perhaps the lack of fear springs from the morbidity. Who knows.

Anyway, I was riding the train home from Oshawa, and wondering what it would be like to be 70. I've never expected to live that long, but it's my grandmother's 70th birthday two days from now. It must be scary to know you're so much closer to death than birth. The mouth looming, the issue but a distant memory. And the inevitability of it. Like the open ocean.

I guess that's why I always wanted to be able to take my own life. It strips much of the fear and powerlessness from it. It becomes more a personal decision than the end of all that you are. You can even half-trick yourself into believing it won't kill you. (The mind knows nothing of death; it never can. The whole of it is life.) And then it does. Rien de plus simple.

And yet I don't think I've ever wanted to kill myself less. Life's balance-like once again. The more precious living, the more feared dying. Like lyrics in a Conor Oberst song.

Anyway. I have stuff to do. This thing isn't going to live itself for me.

Adios, muchachos.