Aged 62, a man enters a hospital after an episode first thing in the morning. He had woken up
feeling like death and not in the sense that he had experienced as a student. This felt different. He
had completely lost the ability to maintain the comfort of a single breath and after a period of
around 5 minutes he had managed to reach for the phone to call the emergency services. Having
been stabilised, he receives the advice to go and seek an oncologist. This is the nicest possible way in
which one can conceive of being told the news that one has cancer.
Despite his fascination and constant thoughts about death, almost only ever existing in the form of
fear and very rarely satisfaction, he was now faced with the inevitable truth that he indeed must die.
And so he wonders where his infallibility went and what he did whilst feeling it.
We often use the phrase when experiencing something unsatisfactory, spread over a period of time,
"those were a few minutes/hours/days/etc that I will never get back". Even now at the age of 20 I
often consider the unsatisfactory moments that I will never get back and how inefficiently I used my
time. Ironically enough one of the main releases from these thoughts is the increasing feeling that I
am, indeed, thinking in an unsatisfactory manner as I ponder on my other unsatisfactory moments.
Therefore it makes me scared that this piece may be one of those such occasions. Nevertheless I've
been wanting to write this piece for a long time now but have not really considered how to do so
and have often lacked the gift of phrase to make this effective. Therefore please forgive me if I come
across unsympathetic to a plight in which we all experience.
This 62 year old man looks back at his life, considering the finite nature of his past is considerably
longer than the finite nature of his future. He looks back at his earliest days, the days as a late
teenager becoming a man, unless of course we use the popular euphemism to define manhood-then
he obtained his manhood at the age of 17. Despite this, the old man, as a youngster, held himself
back, even though he had managed to disguise it in the form of bullies and religion. Nevertheless as
the boy became a man he began to create problems for himself, due to his lacking of a mathematical
thought process, and he subsequently allowed himself to become consumed by them. As the man
ponders on his fallible few years left he now understands this consumption to be what it was, an
unnecessary wall upon which he had to climb. Indeed, the news of his cancer allowed him to walk
through the wall, onto a new pasture of regret.
He remembers how he used to stare at himself in the mirror and grin, to inspect the teeth that
would determine his communicative capabilities for the day. He had more often than not rendered
himself speechless for the day. He would then, as a sixteen year old, lean in closer and closer to find
the spot that would deem him unfuckable. Indeed, he replaced this for unlovable after the obtaining
of his manhood. These would be the initial antagonists that determined his character.
Sitting in his hospital bed, the old man would caress his slightly sloped nose and analyse the social
implications that this gave him. Indeed he blamed this for many of the misfortunes that he felt
nobody had the right to experience-but typically he felt it inevitable that he should. Subsequently,
when he had initially told himself, in his infallible days, that this was all in the mind, his attention
would be averted to his mental state. He often felt that he lacked the mental capacity for anything
successful or anything consistent of those successful people he admires. Therefore he never tried.
He thought about trying, indeed sitting in the hospital bed he still thinks about trying. He then (too
colloquial) thinks about the amount of talented people who simply did not believe in themselves and
therefore their productive potential is lost as the antagonists take over. He then finds it remarkably
arrogant to concede that he may be one of these people but reminds himself that his teenage days,
going into manhood, shaped his mind into a state in which was never going to try.
Born with an interesting bone structure and a high metabolism, he was always conscious about his
height, whether it be too small or too tall. He often used this as a determining factor in his
mannerisms when approaching conversations, placing himself in boxes where he thought he
belonged and thus, creating a social hierarchy based on his appearance. Indeed, as his education
continued and he discovered more and more people of whom he admired, he compared his self
conceived intellectual capacities to those of his idles' and very rarely conceived of a situation in
which he could even be competitive and as he had many discussions and debates with close friends,
he began to convince himself that this is almost a certainty. Nevertheless, he saw a necessary
predicate of a strong friend to be their intellectual superiority and his insecurity here often lead him
to say, having explained this predicate, "That this person shouldn't be too hard to find".
With the impending thought that his one attempt at life had been wasted because he was constantly
trying to pacify the dialogue between the angel on his right shoulder and the devil on his left, and
thus convincing himself that he was unlovable and untalented, the man died alone in hospital having
made no significant impression on anyone's lives.
Insecurities are something in which we all deal with. It's the main thing that fuels the majority of
things one comes across in the material world in which we live in today. There is always a part of
someone that we wish we could have and there is always a part of ourselves that we wish we hadn't
had. Funnily enough, one often finds that the things we wish we hadn't had are things in which some
people wish they had.
Whether it be physicality or ones mentality, our insecurities will hold us back. So what do you do
about it? A common result I've experienced from this is the desire to not express ones feelings- to
create a stiff upper lip. To this I ask you: How lonely do you want to be?
Thinking about time wasted, even at the age of twenty, has made me think about the amount of
time one spends when asleep. It only made sense to me that if I was to be afraid of the big sleep,
that this man is now going through, then I should be equally as fearful of the moments I spend, with
a vacant expression on my face, in the middle of the night. This fear has no doubt shortened my life
and will continue to do so.
Taking all of this into account, I often see myself filling my name in at the top of the grave of this
man. To this man, his insecurities of his past define his unrecognised potential to be happy and
fulfilled. To be loved. After all, no matter what form it comes in, this is all we seek. I live for the day
in which my oncologist tells me my fate and I live for the day in which I fill a vacant grave next to this man's, with a different story to provide definition. Hopefully, all of you do too.
F Christopher Edge
https://fedge22.wordpress.com/
26/11/2015
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