Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead

by Emily R. Austin

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 wonder if anyone really identifies as the adult they’ve morphed into.

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?

We laugh; we make involuntary sounds when we find things funny. Laughing is adorable, if you really think about it.

I am thinking about how these have always been my hands. I was born with them. I used these to hold bottles, blocks, crayons. Everything I have ever eaten. Every book I have ever read. Everything I have ever touched has been with these appendages. I will never have any other hands but these.

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

I felt like I was never in the moment I was in. I was always looking back, or worried about the future.

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 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.

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