🪫: On Fates || chronic illness, decay, exhaustion, depression, fatigue, helplessness, self-harm, the mirror bsky.app/profile/brum...
No wonder then that I walked alone in a bubble of averted eyes down these crowded streets. With time, they'd all found it easy enough to know that they'd die. How much crueler a fate to know that you'd never be allowed to live. ~🪫
Every time I looked at her, I saw that I would only worsen. Every time I looked at her, I saw that, soon enough, my bad days would be good ones, and the bad to come worse still. Every time I looked at her, I knew I would go on existing anyways, spared even the mercy of death.
Decades older, she was nevertheless a mirror of me, a cruel reflection in which every ounce of pain and frustration and resentment had been magnified, every bit of exhaustion redoubled. Decrepit and decaying, I saw the truth of my future every single day. Decline. Despair.
I looked to my side, forcing myself to see what others refused to, what I'd seen every single day since that first. I saw myself, as I was. My own life, as I lived it. All the suffering and resentment I lived with, day after day after day. Only, it wasn't the same at all.
For them, death was a state, the finality of an outcome so unlike one's current state as to be near impossible to consider. And as such of no concern to them. For some small number of us, though, death was a process. Dying, dying was hard. And living in spite of it harder still.
And so it was that, after a short period of adaptation, society all but returned to normal. All but us, the afflicted. I peered furtively at passersby, taking in the myriad endings their Fates foretold. Cancer. Heart disease. An overdose. Vehicle accident. The usual fare.
People just ignored them. If your Fate was to die fast and young, what was there but to squeeze in every last drop of life in the interim? And if instead one was to die after a long life, why bother thinking of the future? Damn the consequences; apparently they wouldn't matter.
I nodded politely to the girl and wandered out of the shop to the street. Those who survived adapted quickly. It became gauche to even notice another's Fate, much less comment on it, and how could one acknowledge one's own without tacitly, indirectly doing the same to others?
It was a matter of proof incontrovertible that one just wasn't strong enough to survive in a world devoid of make-believe, one in which it seemed impossible to forget. They were wrong. The human capacity for self-delusion and willful blindness should never be underestimated.