Colorblind

by Siera Maley

“Do you ever wonder why we all try so hard to live to age 80?” I asked Robbie abruptly. “What’s the point? You go to school, then you live to work and work to live until you retire, and then you die, either painfully or not. And that’s if you’re lucky. It all seems so pointless sometimes.” “Hell if I know. They have an entire industry dedicated to making sure people don’t feel pessimistic enough to ask the questions you’re asking now.” “Psychiatry?” I asked. “Religion,”

It was no wonder Robbie was an Atheist; the idea that something intelligent enough to design thinking, feeling, living creatures would then assign them unchangeable expiration dates was horrifying.

“Harper, people are not milk cartons,” Dad sighed out. “You don’t pick and choose the ones you think will last the longest without going sour. If it feels right, you just go with it until it doesn’t feel right anymore. And sometimes when something goes wrong, it hurts. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t worth it in the first place.”

Have you ever considered the fact that maybe the goal of life isn’t to get through it as painlessly as possible?”

Did you know that one of the biggest regrets dying people have is that they let other people dictate how they lived their lives?”

I thought of all the things I hadn’t done right. I wished I’d given her everything she’d wanted from the very beginning. I’d conquer every fear I had now just to see her smile.

“I don’t want to die,” I clarified, glancing over my shoulder. The drop was steep, with rocks at the bottom. There was no way I’d survive it. “But my number isn’t seventeen. All I wanted was to know that I could beat the numbers.

“Why do you think bad things happen to good people?” I asked him abruptly. He took a moment to respond. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “As cruel as it is, I think it might just be bad luck.” “And you’re okay with that? You can go through life every day having accepted that?” He pat my back once with his hand. “I think I have to be okay with it. And I think that everyone struggles with it. Some people make themselves okay with it by believing that there’s a God with a plan, and that good people die because there’s something better waiting on the other side. For those of us who don’t believe that… We just have to learn to be okay.”

I didn’t believe in a God, I knew, because God was meant to be the epitome of everything good, and I couldn’t believe anything completely good was holding the giant magnifying glass given the life I’d had. But I didn’t believe anything wholly bad was responsible either. Robbie was probably right. It probably was just fate. But God and the Devil supposedly came with ears, so maybe fate did, too.

I had no way of knowing what or who decided how we lived, or how long we lived, or what the consequences of our actions and decisions were. I would almost certainly never know. When I died, I wouldn’t know what chain of events had led directly to my death, and I wouldn’t know what I would’ve been able to do to change it, or even if it ever could’ve been changed. Bad things were inevitable. Death was inevitable. But maybe the reverse was true: that good things were equally inevitable. And maybe sometimes inevitability liked to take a back seat to second chances.