All the images will disappear

Press play before reading

0:00

"Yes. They’ll forget us. Such is our fate, there is no help for it. What seems to us so serious, significant, very important, will one day be forgotten or seem unimportant. And it’s curious that we can’t possibly tell what exactly will be considered great and important, and what will seem petty and ridiculous. And it may be that our present life that we accept so readily, will in time seem strange, inconvenient, stupid, not clean enough - perhaps even sinful" Anton Chekhov

To exist is to drink oneself without thirst - Annie Ernaux

All the images will disappear; layer upon layer of our textured life will unravel, thread by thread, moment by moment, bit by bit until there is nothing left but the gaping white sky of a future we're no longer a part of. Soon, language too will be a foreign land, incapable of capturing the precision of a present moment or feeling, for time runs like water through a clenched fist - tricksy, untenable, hardly even conceivable in the printshop of the mind that tries so hard to impress order upon the un-ending page of present chaos. And so it follows, that the best of you and the worst of me will eventually be forgotten - all that we've said, all that we've done, all that we've ever felt, ever thought. Yes, all these lines of perspective that we've had strung out in front of us over the years will suddenly converge and guide our eyes to a vanishing point, and as we stare through this solitary lens we will see the entirety of our life played out to us in a series of fast moving images proliferating one on top of the other as flashing film of what it ever was to be alive: your birth, your first steps, your first words, tree-climbing, star-gazing, sun-kissed holidays, exam results, first loves, first kisses, first heartbreaks, and the others that follow, friends lost and gained, jobs lost and gained, marriages, divorces, the death of your parents, the birth of your children and their children after that. And then all this life, this great swirling universe of 'being-ness' you have held within your body for so many years will melt into a calm sea, and then a nothingness.

Isn't it strange that it is only when you look at your life through the lens of not existing, that the meaning and purpose of existence comes so sharply into focus? Perhaps in the same way that colour is brightened when hung against a backdrop of blackness, the fragility of life is intensified by the inevitability of death and the fullness of love fattened by the skinny hollowness of loss. When we consider the silence that the end will bring - a silencing of all that we know, experience, think and feel - then language, words, thoughts become ever so crucial. It is why I write - so I can preserve these fragments of life to prove I have loved, and grieved, and laughed my being into an immensity beyond measure.

We spend so much time zoomed in on the particularity of our everyday lives - our 9-5s, our mistakes, our regrets, our concerns about money and what we said last night and how we present ourselves and what the future will look like. I, for one, have spent a life time overthinking the world to a granularity "what if I'd done that or said that, why did they do that to me, why did I do that to them, if I could just turn back the clocks". But in doing so, I have forgotten the vastness of the world outside of myself and forgotten too, the vastness of the world inside of myself. When one recognises the total expansiveness of history, of memory, of love, of literature, of the collective mind that sings and breaks the glass in songs, and poems, and books - then one understands the near-infinitude of the self and indeed the other. What is more beautiful than that?

So yes, we will die as we first began - as a nothingness, a smallness and yet we have the opportunity and the joy to make ourselves star-like, boundless - so we must indeed exist engulfing each moment, not out of thirst but out of a desire to live fiercely, largely and shamelessly.