Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead

by Emily R. Austin

I wonder if my death will be what defines me.

Thinking about washing the dishes feels a lot like thinking of going for a jog. I will do it tomorrow.

Sometimes I wonder if I have really been the same person my whole life. I stare at the picture, and think: Is that really me? I have this bizarre feeling like I was a different person at every other stage of my life. I feel so removed from myself then. Sometimes I feel like I was a different person a month ago. A day. Five minutes. Now.

I told her that I’m not sure that’s a real syndrome. I said I wonder if everyone’s an impostor. 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. I remember being sixteen and feeling eleven. I remember thinking, how could I be a teenager? I remember finishing high school and thinking, am I grown now? Is this what it feels like? I feel the same as I did before. I think I am an impostor. Twenty-seven years ago I was a baby. Before that I was a clump of cells. Before that I didn’t exist. How could I be a bookstore clerk, or a Catholic, or a woman, or a person at all? I’m a life force contained in the deformed body of a baby. Of course I’m a fraud. The fact that I’m able to carry myself through life without being crushed beneath the psychological weight of being alive proves that I’m a con artist. Aren’t we all con artists?

According to the book I was reading today, stealing is one of the top ten worst things a person can do.

Lol

I think about how gross people are. I think about public bathrooms, armpits, and about all of our dirty hands. I think about how infection and diseases are spread. I think about how every human has a butt, and about how disgusting that is.

Thank God this one doesn’t seem to apply to women either. I’m disappointed God is so homophobic that he forgot about lesbians, but I guess I would rather be forgotten than put to death. Wait. Would I?

I find it so bizarre that I occupy space, and that I am seen by other people.

Look at me now, I’m crying. That’s ridiculous. Hey! Stop crying. It doesn’t matter. Consider the vastness of space!

I came to the realization that every moment exists in perpetuity regardless of whether it’s remembered. What has happened has happened; it occupies that moment in time forever. I was an eleven-year-old girl lying in the grass one summer. I knew in that moment that was true and recognized that I would blaze through moments for the rest of my life, forgetting things, and becoming ages older, until I forgot everything—so I consoled myself by committing to remember that one moment.

I was finally awarded selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors for all my hard work as a depressed person.

I am thinking about how enormous my thighs look pressed down on the concrete, while simultaneously thinking about how small I am in the grand scheme of things.

Everything matters so much and so little; it is disgusting.

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.