Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead

by Emily R. Austin

Why do I need to know what her rationale is? Why can’t I just trust that the people around me have their own justification for their requests and their behavior?

What if beneath every lawyer’s suit and every stay-at-home-parent’s apron, everyone is just a baby who doesn’t know what they’re doing? I wonder if anyone really identifies as the adult they’ve morphed into.

Of course there are sadder things. This is a drop in the bucket. The world is full of so much sadness that it eclipses the sadness of this. That doesn’t actually make this any less sad, it just means that there is so much potent sadness on earth that this becomes trivial. Everything becomes trivial.

My mother had a baby, and her mother had a baby, and her mother had a baby. Every woman in my family before me lived to have a baby—just so that baby could grow up to have another baby. If I don’t have a baby, then all of those women reproduced just so that I could exist. I am the final product. I am the final baby.

“Make a wish!” she says, gesturing toward the candles. I stare into the glowing flecks of fire and wish: I wish that I find something distracting enough to occupy my mind with thoughts unrelated to the futility of my existence, or that I die in the least disruptive way possible for my family.

It’s strange people don’t like how their bodies look. It’s strange we waste any of our time concerning ourselves with how our skin drapes over our bones or how fat cultivates.

I’ve got it all figured out. Humans are cancer. If we were to look at earth from a distance, we would look like white blood cells, and watching our evolution would be like watching cancer spread.