A Nasty Drawn-Out Death

 "Any thinking person is afraid of what they deserve."

Stanley Tucci as Jefferson Grieff in Inside Man.

This line swallowed me up.

It applies to every underachiever, which is 99% of us. We are given this gift of life, which I'm told is precious. We don't treat it like it's precious; we spit on it and kick it around and ignore it; we live as if we are immortal - then we die. In regret.

Every single one of us knows what we should have done to make our lives better. Every single one of us knows what we didn't do and what we did wrong - things that could have made us happier, things that put us where we ended up - despondent, lost, afraid, broken.

We are all afraid of what we deserve. We know what we deserve, we know it's not good, we know it's our fault.

As I conciously pissed my life away over the decades, I always fantasized that if I ever get what I really want, I will die the next day. Cruel irony. And maybe what I deserve.

Given the life I have "lived", what I deserve is a nasty, drawn-out death. I deserve to lose everything I have. I deserve to suffer. I deserve to be broken as a human being and cast to the side of the road. 

Whatever nastiness life tortures me with in the end - I created that. I set the table, I made it happen.

I am a thinking person who is afraid of what I deserve.

But I can still change that. I'm trying. I can't accept that I will die a fool; a man who laughed at life until life ripped my fucking lungs out.

But at the moment it is a believable reality.