I was told as a child that each glimmering star represented a new hope, a potential solution for any problem life may present. I was told to pray and to have faith. I was told to never surrender my dreams to the realm of impossibility and to always look both ways before making a decision. As a child, one is blindly faithful. We trust our parents, we trust our gods. We follow along without question, obsequious to a fault. But then we grow, we mature, we encounter new things, new people. We soon begin to question everything. Why do infants perish in car accidents? Why does dad always smell like perfume and pussy when he comes home from work? Why does mom start trembling every time the phone rings? Such questions have their answers. We just choose not to seek them. We don't want to know. As far as we're concerned, babies are just fragile, dad sits next to a slut at work, and mom just doesn't like sudden noises. We care nothing for the facts--the child died because someone was fiddling with their radio and failed to stop in time, dad's fucking the aforementioned office slut, and mom has been smoking for the last two years while insisting that she quit long ago and is now expecting a call from an oncologist regarding blood work. But these truths are uncomfortable. We prefer our own fanciful ideas. We sit around and we imagine ourselves living in a quaint little suburban neighborhood where everyone smokes Cohibas and drinks the finest whiskies ("Hey there, neighbor, how the heck are ya? Why don't you and the wife mosey on over directly and have dinner with Marcy and me? She's cookin' enough for a small army, I tell you. I don't know how I'm gonna keep the weight off. She's a cookin' machine, that one. So how about it there, buddy?"). We perceive ourselves as being far greater and far more important than we really are. We want to believe that our death will somehow impact the world. We want the masses to accept us, to love us, to call for us. We feel we are impervious to all that ails everyone else ("Cancer? Won't happen to me. Smoke 'em if you got 'em, boys!") and that we are wholly unique. We consider our own mortality as little as possible and ultimately brush it off, saying that we don't need to worry about death until we hit sixty or seventy. Unfortunately for us, life doesn't really give a shit about age. A three year-old? How precious! But the city bus hits the kid so hard that she's knocked clear out of her little sparkling dress shoes. Sixteen and have never known the warmth of a woman? Here, have a little leukemia. Twenty-three and your life is just now starting to take off? Too bad about that black ice. Fifty-five and happy? Let's just get your children out of the way with suicides and overdoses, feed your lovely wife of thirty years bad meat, and then send you a sympathy card laced with cyanide. That sounds fair, right?
The truth is that no one knows when they'll go. Maybe today, maybe tomorrow. It doesn't matter who you are, how old you are, where you live, where you go. One day, you'll look death in the face and she'll slap on the shackles and lead you away. I'm not going to be one of those assholes who says shit like "Live for today because tomorrow may never come." I hate that. I will, say, however, that you should get your affairs in order. You should banish all regret and go out swinging. Death may be more formidable than you ever will be, but maybe you can clip that bitch on the chin on the way down.