Sometimes I wish I believed in an afterlife, because it might make me happier in this one.
I was thinking about that last night. Things just seem pointless a lot of the time. In an existential sense, I think they are. As I’ve said before, I don’t think there’s a point to anything. I think we’re just here, and that’s that.
But I might be happier if I thought my existence were, in some form or another, permanent.
In my imagination, Heaven contains a big infinite library containing every book ever written. In my version of Heaven, you can travel through time and revisit any point in the Earth’s past, witness any historical event. Heaven for me is like a big intellectual vacation.
But I don’t believe in Heaven. The afterlife is a story I used to tell myself to deal with the awful, horrible reality that someday I will not exist. Since the beginning of time (except for the last 31 revolutions of Earth around the Sun) I have not existed, and in a few decades I will cease to exist for the rest of Time. I live right now between two huge Ice Ages that do not contain me. It’s such a scary thought.
Life seems so short to me. I always have this fear that death is just around the corner. But I’m 31 years old, so it’s like that my life isn’t even half over yet. In fact, I’ve lived just a third of my grandfather’s 94 years so far. And considering that I spent the first 17 or 18 years just getting the hang of things, I’ve done a lot in the subsequent 13 years. Possibly just one-fifth of my adulthood has passed so far. There’s so much time ahead in which to do stuff.
It just seems like stuff doesn’t happen, though. I can’t accept that I will live my life not having achieved anything. Sure, I could entertain myself for the next 50 or 60 years, seeing shows and reading books and doing crossword puzzles, but what about leaving something behind?
Matt and I were talking about this last night, and he said I’ll leave behind lots of great memories in the people who know me. But what about when they’re gone? This is why I sometimes think it would be reassuring to have children: to know that in a few hundred years I’ll still exist on some family tree as the progenitor of one of its branches.
This is all a way to make myself immortal, in some sense. I wish I could be the subject of a future biography. I want to be remembered by people outside my immediate circle.
I guess stuff only happens if you take steps. And that’s what I’m trying to do now — take baby steps. Writing an 800- to 1000-word piece that I could send in to some free local newspaper to be published. But I have so little faith in myself and my abilities, and I’m so afraid of being rejected. I don’t feel like I could write something that the gay newspapers would be interested in publishing. Nothing is coming to my mind. Maybe I just need to sit down and write whatever gay-related memories or thoughts pop into my head. Maybe I’m overestimating the quality of what they’d accept. Maybe it doesn’t have to be light and fluffy and gayishly humorous.
This just sucks.