Mortality anxiety: You're Not the Only One

A sudden, visceral comprehension of mortality. …

You know that feeling when you're just typing an email, a really boring one about toner cartridges, and you catch sight of your hand—and there it is, a new spot, darker than the others. …

Not sad, not angry, just… pure, unadulterated dread. …

lie in bed after everyone else is asleep and it's just really quiet except for like your own heartbeat? …

I was pouring Earl Grey just this morning, around 7:15, and I saw my hand – my right hand, the dominant one – give a little shimmy, almost imperceptible, as the stream hit the teacup, and I found… …

and today, the sun was going down, all orange and purple, hitting the steel girders and making everything glow. …

I wake sometimes with a taste like rust in my mouth a metallic tang that tells me things are shifting deep inside a slow geologic creep I suppose the doctor calls it benign hypertension but I know… …

I spend my lunch hour, every damn day, scrolling those life expectancy calculators. …

I just came back from someone's funeral, a colleague really, and the whole evening I've been here in my armchair, just checking my pulse, obsessively, like it's a diagnostic test for something much… …

My parents—God rest their souls, they came here with nothing but the clothes on their backs and a worn copy of the Bhagavad Gita—they drummed it into me. …

you ever just like driving in the rain over a super high bridge and your brain decides to REALLY focus on how easy it would be to just… swerve into the black water below lol like not even in a sad… …

a vagal response maybe? …

I’m lying here and it’s past midnight and I can hear that THUMP-thump sound and it’s just the blood moving through me and it’s all I can hear right now and it’s terrifying because it’s just this tiny… …

just saw myself in the hall mirror tonight before bed and felt a cold jab of something like genuine terror not the kind you feel when a mortar round goes off too close or when the engine sputters on… …

Woke up before dawn. …

Her little fluffy pink ones. …

Like, really splinters that thin veneer you’ve got going on, the one you painstakingly applied every single morning before the daycare drop-off, before the ten thousand emails, before the dinner… …

That’s where I’ve been sitting for the past few weeks, ever since the rhododendrons started blooming. …

I saw him today, my father, standing in what used to be his pride and joy – the vegetable patch. …

He still keeps my grandma’s side of the bed completely untouched. …