By MissGradStudent
“In this life, you’ve got to know what you want. You have to visualize it, and then you have to pull it down. Want it, see it, take it.” – Zadie Smith, Swing Time
I sometimes feel that I can see death happening. When I’m in a plane, driving, or doing mundane things like walking past a black cat. I feel Death approaching with its infinite span of blackness and non-existence. I feel an end of a life and all my inconsequence. I feel sadness for that end, that inability to continue to exist and feel and know and learn and interact. I feel sad for it now because I know that when death comes, I won’t be able to feel it then. I’ll feel nothing.
I’m not anxious when I get this feeling. I’m accepting of what eventually will be. I’ll drive and know that a car can plow into me and end me right then and that will be the last thing I ever know. Except I won’t know it anymore. I’m okay flying and realizing the plane can fall out of the sky. I am more worried about the moment in between the fall and the end. The feelings I’ll have before I don’t have them anymore.
I’m worried about all the ambition that lies within me that will never be expressed. And this creates within me a restlessness, a need to make an impact on the world. I need to do something so that my death doesn’t cut short a plan my mind has yet to fully grapple with and set forth. I needn’t be Malcom or Martin or Tupac or the countless others who died in the middle of a great personal revolution that could have changed the world. I need to do more, see more, be more.
I want to change the world. And everyday that I don’t, I feel that lurking tendril of death more clearly, more forcefully, more tragically. I’ll just die, and it will be okay because my death cost the world nothing. Death would cement and fortify my inconsequence.
Invisible Womanhood 