I so desperately don't want to stop existing. I want to keep learning and thinking and feeling, I want to experience everything I possibly can, I want to see how the future looks. I try to live life to the fullest but I already had such a late start, being disabled and too poor to afford care until very recently. It was only through sheer luck that I was able to get to where I am now in life, and the second I started to really enjoy myself, I suddenly can't escape the knowledge that one day it will end. And life after death being the same as life before birth does not comfort me. I know what happened before I was born, I get to experience the past to a certain extent while I'm alive, but the future? I will never see the future. It feels like the world is ending, my chest gets tight, my heart starts beating so fast and loud in my ears, my brain gets cold and fuzzy, my fingertips go numb and tingly, and suddenly I'm hyperventilating and dizzy and sobbing on the floor.
There's just not enough time. I'm so young, only 26, and yet the past decade went by so fast it's like I was 16 and I blinked and now I'm close to 30. And sometimes, the fact that I'm so young also scares me. It means that the worst thing to happen to me probably hasn't happened yet. So many diseases I could get, accidents that could happen. And then BOOM, no more me. No more of everything I've ever known. I smoked heavily for 8 years, and even though I've now quit, what if those 8 years were enough to end me? I just hope that when I do die, I'm not aware that I'm about to die, because I know that I wouldn't enjoy my final seconds. I would be desperately clinging to life, begging a god I've never believed in to please let me stay a little longer. Please let me exist just for a few more hours, days, years. Don't take this away from me, please.
Sometimes I write in my journal little messages to future humans, where I give consent to bring me back. Just in case in some distant future they finally crack the code, please I give you permission, please bring me back, please give me another chance. I find myself imagining an ethics board of futuristic scientists all debating whether or not it's morally okay to bring past humans back to life. They will be using quantum computers to scan massive databases of archived journals written by ancient humans, and then they will find my little plea. And they'll bring me back.
