I am a chemist, I am a journalist, I am a maker of death, I am someone I will never know. I am parts of all that came before me, and I will become a part of what lay ahead of me. But, I don’t know what that is. I don’t know that I’ve ever known what that is. An infinite number of paths sprawled before me, but I know not where to place my step. Maybe I’ll try a feint to trick my mind into telling me what it is I must do.
I don’t know if this is a universal experience, but there comes a time in childhood where you experience grief and loss for the first time. You experience a death and are forced to reconcile with that absolute that inevitably our lives will end. I remember lying in bed in tears, distraught that eventually my parents will no longer be here, and at some point that distress turned into terror when I came to understand that, at some point, I too will end. I was hardly old enough to understand the facilities of the world, and now that world was shattering beneath me. I would spend nights trying to comfort myself with what might come of our passing, where we might end up, but in time it fell out of my mind. I was a kid, I liked playing basketball, and military movies, and running around the park with my friends, and playing Ratchet & Clank. There was no space in my mind for death and how to feel about it.
I no longer like playing basketball. I no longer enjoy military movies. I no longer hold those same curiosities. That terror crept back into the place it once occupied, but it’s different now. It’s matured in the same way that I have. I still have a fear in my understanding of my own mortality, but I have grappled with loss and grief closer now than I ever did then, and now I have a greater familiarity of it. I still feel like a kid. Not in the sense that I feel childish and whimsical, but in the sense that I don’t feel that I’ve grown to match my years of life. In the sense that I still get frightened of things that I don’t fully understand. In the sense that I still feel small in this world.
I still pick at scabs and scratch my bug bites. I still feel every pain in my chest like a gravedigger with every thrust of his shovel. I still worry about my place in the firing line, but I worry about it in the same way that I wonder when I will take my last glance at the sky. I’ve become more familiarized with the beauty of the world around me. I think a younger me would ignore the sound of cicada’s at night and ask “why is this place such a shithole?” I stopped paying attention to the shapes of clouds and started looking at my hands more. I stopped paying attention to the flowers on which I now trampled. I became too concerned with myself and how I fit into my surroundings and stopped looking at the surroundings themselves.
I try to appreciate what life offers me more now than I did before. I don’t know if I truly do or not, but I try. I think, anymore, more and more of my hatred is turning outwards. I think more of my hatred is turned towards those surroundings with which I am now beginning to love and value. It’s ironic; when I was younger, when I spent so much of my time detesting the place I lived, it was much more quiet and natural than it feels now. I don’t say my hatred is placed outwards to say that I’m becoming more resentful of the place in which I’ve grown up, I mean it to say that I’m becoming more resentful of what is happening to the place in which I’ve grown up. I have to sit and watch as the sky surrounding my favorite coffee shop is blacked out by a monolithic luxury apartment complex that will certainly be inaccessible for many. I have to sit and watch as the field beyond the neighborhood I ran through as a child is torn apart and supplanted by a factory used to manufacture chips intended for AI use. I have to sit and watch as the governor and empty suits of the state that I have called home my entire life is sold to the highest bidder who in turn divvy it up and rape and bleed small communities of their resources.
I want to love my surroundings, I want to love the place in which I live, I really do, but it’s starting to feel like I’m not allowed to. It’s starting to feel like a helpless, fleeting cry as the things I am finally beginning to spend more time staring at and doting are ripped from me and replaced with things that point towards a far bleaker future. I should have paid more attention when I was younger.
