Ashes to Ashes

They say inheritance is genetics, wealth, and sickness. I inherited self-annihilation. I was born dead, spent my teenage years trying to get better, relapsed time and again. I turned thirty and thought to myself: seriously? Putting a "3" in front of my age felt like I had cheated death, like I was in a movie directed by someone who hated me, and sought revenge.

Other people are strange to me. Or I should say, more specifically, healthy people are strange to me. My mind and my body are separate, always have been. Life seems easy for the healthy, they drink their coffee and go to work and have political opinions in a world that they are going to spend, maximum, ten decades in.

How morbid, you're thinking. I wonder if these same people have watched a body being fed into a crematorium. People like to make up fantasies like "the Phoenix rising from the ashes," as if somehow death can be reversed, but when I watched the body being incinerated, to me, it seemed pretty final.

People are so scared of death, and dying. You can't even say it; it's a dirty word, like menopause, or mental illness. Both facts of human existence. Better to doom scroll and shake our fists at rage-bait on Twitter and Instagram.

I am weary of people who drink their coffee and go to their soul-crushing jobs that don't pay rent or put food on the table and don't question their existence. How do they do it?

All I can do is rise up, every day, like everyone else, until that day ceases to come, and I learn if I am a Phoenix, after all.