Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead

by Emily R. Austin

I study the trees as I crawl past them. I do this to occupy my mind with thoughts that are not related to my own fragile mortality. That is a pine tree. A maple. Another pine. Spruce. My death, and the death of everyone I love, is inevitable. Pine again.

It turns out the crackers I stole are the body of Christ.

Organ music starts to play. Jeff begins walking down the aisle like a bride.

Jeff makes the sign of the cross, and then says loudly: “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” To my horror, the crowd surrounding me replies in unison: “Amen.” Startled by this, I put a hand to my chest. We have lines?

I wouldn’t mind knowing whose big idea it was to install organs in God’s so-called houses when they were clearly manufactured by the devil himself.

That baby has no idea why her parents put her in that uncomfortable outfit. She doesn’t anticipate that an old man in a robe is going to dunk her head underwater today.

I wonder how often I occupy spaces that were recently inhabited by dead people.

Everyone is standing up to get in line for their own bites of the Lord.

Her head had hardly hit the pillow before her engine started revving up.

I find it so bizarre that I occupy space, and that I am seen by other people. I feel like I am falling through space and Eleanor just threw me a rose. It’s such a sweet, pointless gesture. It would be less devastating to fall through space alone, without someone else falling next to me. Whenever someone does something nice for me, I feel intensely aware of how strange and sad it is to know someone.

“He’s ignoring my texts,” I explain, panting. “I was worried he died.” “Oh my God, Gilda!” my mom shouts. “What a terrible thing to say. What is wrong with you?”

there is a circular connection between thoughts, behaviors, and feelings.” She said, “It works like a feedback loop. What we think affects how we feel and act.

I am one of 7.53 billion people on a planet orbiting one of 100 billion stars in one galaxy among billions of galaxies in an ever-expanding universe.

I feel simultaneously intensely insignificant and hyperaware of how important everyone is.