Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead

by Emily R. Austin

It is tragic both that this man has died and that his stupid impromptu attempt at entertaining himself misfired in a way that will now define him. I wonder if my death will be what defines me.

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.

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 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?

I have to push the sadness I feel about Grace and Rosemary and forgetful old women deep into the grottoes of my stomach, next to my thoughts about cats in house fires, because this is what it means to exist. This is how people stay alive.

I remember our neighbor asking me, “How is your dad doing?” I answered truthfully, “Not great.” I think the neighbor sent him a card, or something, because my parents found out what I said. They both screamed at me. I remember sitting at the bottom of the stairs while my mom lectured me about privacy, and my dad shrieked “I’m fine!” at the top of his lungs into my face.

“Are you okay?” I ask him. “Me?” he replies. “I’ve been better.” “What happened?” “I got in a fight,” he explains. “What about you? What happened to you?” I pause. “I’m dying.” He makes a face. “You’re dying?” I nod. He exhales. “Yikes. How long do you have?” I answer gravely. “I have no idea.”

At nighttime in the winter I always look for lit-up windows with open curtains. I like seeing a snapshot inside other people’s houses. I look at what show the TV is playing. I look at the furniture. Even when I see the TV is playing an uninteresting show and the house is filled with outdated, ugly furniture, I always wish I were inside.

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.

The night sky is dotted in bright little specks; the night sky is dotted in monstrous fireballs. I am the size of ten million ants, and I don’t make up even one percentage of the weight of the rock that I’m floating on. Everything matters so much and so little; it is disgusting.

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.

When I reach the front of the room, Jeff smiles at me, rubs ashes on my forehead, and says, “Remember: you are dust and to dust you will return.”

I remember watching rhinos chew branches at the Toronto Zoo. My fifth-grade class went on a field trip. I remember looking at the rhinos, listening to their teeth crunch twigs and wood, and thinking: those things are just like dinosaurs, and dinosaurs are just like dragons. I decided rhinos were like magical creatures. The only reason they aren’t considered magical is because they’re real.

There are a lot of things on earth that I think would be considered magic if they weren’t real. Dreaming, for example. The fact that babies are created inside of women’s bodies; the whole concept of conception. Castles. Trees. Whales. Lions. Birds. Rainbows. Water. The northern lights. Volcanos. Lightning. Fire.

I look at his thinning hair, the wrinkles around his eyes, and at his unruly old-man eyebrows. I look at his eyes and think about how those have always been his eyes. Even when he was a little boy, that’s what his eyes looked like.

I’ve got it all figured out. We’re bacteria. The universe is probably just a thread in some larger thing’s eyelash, and we exist on it the way micro-organisms exist in our eyes. We’re like skin flora.

It’s easy for me to accept that I am bacteria, or a parasite, or cancer. It’s easy for me to accept that my life is trivial, and that I am a speck of dust. It is hard for me to accept that for the people around me, however. It’s hard for me to accept that my brother’s life doesn’t matter, or that old women who die don’t matter, or even that rabbits or cats don’t matter. I feel simultaneously intensely insignificant and hyperaware of how important everyone is.