Your fatalistic attitude should scare you. In fact, it should terrify you. Most of us are fatalistic without even realizing. We believe that things happen for a reason, that there is a greater being controlling this all. It’s the reason we get drunk and walk home without considering the consequences. It’s the reason that, despite there being a long history of earthquakes in Japan, only 3 per cent of the population of Kobe, which was badly affected by an earthquake in 2011, had any insurance to cover the damage. Fatalism should not be confused with ignorance. We all know that bad things happen, but we never think they’ll happen to us. People move to these high-risk zones, they gravitate towards high-risk situations, because the lifestyle, social circle or economic attraction that drew them there is perceived to be greater than the risk.
Depending on whom you ask, the idea of me studying English at University is almost laughable. To lots of my friends, I’m anything but a bookworm and I’m far too dense to produce any kind of deep or meaningful philosophy. To them, I’m a party girl, or I was. The think about party girls is that they don’t get hurt; they don’t feel anything at all. Much like Tom and Daisy, we were careless people. We smashed things up, hurt people and then retreated back into our spotlights or vast carelessness or whatever it was that seemed to keep us together. We let other people clean up the messes we carelessly made, until the worst happened. Until I watched paramedics clean the remains of my careless best friend up off the tarmac. Whatever fire and pull towards club toilets and empty shot glasses I once had died on the road too, that night.
This was not the first accidental death of a teen I’d ever seen, though. 2 years ago the People You May Know tab on Facebook flashed the image of a local dead boy across my computer screen. I’d read about it in the paper and heard what had happened at school. He’d taken something in a club and dropped dead almost instantly. His sister was in the year above me, but she disappeared a few months later. I think their family moved across the country because it was all too painful, I don’t blame them. It was a tragedy, but tragedies, like most things sad and violent, feel so distance and disconnected from our lives until they become our lives. What I’m trying to say is that to somebody, somewhere, we are all People You May Know. Bad things can happen to any one of us.
I don’t know if there is a God up there, but I do know that 6 weeks after my aforementioned best friend left the world, I stopped looking when I crossed the street. I was confused and crushed and so goddamn careless and the only true thing I knew was that we were all dying. And, without Danny, living seemed like the drawn out process. It became an inconvenience. I was no longer scared to die, I was terrified to be alive. That sub-human feeling is something I will never forget. I was sixteen years old and ready for my breathing to cease.
I can confidently say that I never would’ve actually committed suicide, but I wished for stuff. I longed for a car crash or a coma in the hope that I’d see things differently or maybe even nothing at all. My mind set has flipped now and I don’t want to die, I want more days that I’m going to get and it hurts to know that my time will eventually run out. I’m still working through some stuff but I clearly haven’t yet figured out how to make peace with death, healthily.
I’m trying not to blame Danny for my weird belief system or for being the reason that I look twice before I get out of my car and night. Now, I constantly wait for bad things to happen and I know this isn’t healthy but neither is vast carelessness. That being said, I’m not mad at Danny. I was for a long time but not anymore. As much as I wanted to, I could never get inside his head. It irritated me but I do not believe that he wanted to die. In fact, I think that more than anything in the world, Danny wanted to live. He loved the world because he’d seen it, in all of its colors and dimensions. I don’t know the exact number of days we have left here on this planet, but I know that it’s not enough.
Now in Japan, 23% of people have earthquake insurance because they’ve learnt that while nothing lasts forever, things last for right now. Be impulsive, I dare you, but stop that from becoming recklessness. Let the fatalism fade. Let it die before you do. Don’t fear the world but please remember that you are a tragedy waiting to happen. Start living like the People You May Know, or more specifically the way the People You May Know-If -They-Were-Not-Now-Dead would live their lives. You are not special and you are not exempt from the end of it all. Death is not a demon you can outrun. Stop living like nothing can hurt you. It can. Stop living like you’ve got forever. You haven’t. Sorry.
