Dying

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I have always considered myself to be immortal and indestructable, a hangover from adolescance that has persisted for a decade or two longer than it should. This illusion was strengthened a while ago when I first moved into my house. I was standing on my new sofa, hanging a new picture on my wall when I leant back to check on the alignment and fell off, right onto my new glass-topped coffee table that I just bought from Poya. As an instinctual reaction, I thrust out my arm to break the fall and my hand went straight through the glass, shattering it and leaving several viciously-sharp protuding triangles. I closed my eyes for a second and imagined the scene of sliced arteries and blood pumping out all over the floor. In that second I was sure of my own death, because I was alone at the time and I would surely lose conciousness at any moment, before collapsing onto the glass shards as my blood seeped out all over the floor and all over the new rug I had just bought, also from Poya (I was only a little dissapointed to realise that my final thoughts would be of how I should have moved the coffee table and that the rug, because it was red, might not be too badly stained). When I opened my eyes, though, there was no blood, and no gaping holes in my arm where my flesh had been slit open like a sack of rice. I had a small crescent-shaped scratch on my arm (it didnt even scar) and a bruise just below my elbow where it hit the steel frame. I gingerly pulled my miracled limb from the glass carnage and for the next half an hour I examined it from finger-tips to armpits, several times, quietly marvelling at my godlike powers and superhuman strength. I thought of myself as a kind of comic-book hero, like the Bruce Willis character (in a film I cant remember and dont have the motivation to look-up) I have never got ill in my life and never even so much as broke a bone.

These days though, it seems that my body is trying to tell me that my feelings of invincibility are misplaced and that I should perhaps be pondering the notion that I, just like all you peasant-human, inomniscient, inomnipotent paupers that are reading this post, am a mere mortal. It is not an idea that I have accepted completely, not yet, but I think that it will happen sooner rather than later. Yes. I’m not young anymore. Yes, my hair is going grey, yes, I am slowly growing man-tits that I can feel bouncing slightly as I run down a flight of stairs (I’ve started taking the lift to avoid this unpleasant sensation) and yes, I feel that my immortality is slipping slowly and silently away; as unoticeable as a continental drift but real enough, nonetheless. These last two weeks or so have seen me chained to the khazi with a violent bout of the shits, a gum infection on one side of my mouth that makes eating very painful, and a severe toothache on the other that is just about the most painful experience I have ever had, and pretty much made my whole mouth off-limits to any kind of food except soup which I hate at the best of times. I have blisters on my feet because my sandals fell apart and I had to wear my boots that I hadnt worn for a year and they made my feet too hot. I had some kind of bizarre swelling on my neck that came and went and my ears continue to be a constant source of irritation with their itching and aching.

It is occuring to me, bit-by-bit, that I am not a god. Yet I am reluctant to let go because once you believe that you are mortal, then you begin the (very slow) process of dying.

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