That’s the oldest, prettiest, and most dangerous lie they ever sold you. It’s the sweet, cheap poison they pour in your ear from the day you’re born, the thing that keeps you quiet, keeps you in line, keeps you from burning the whole goddamn house down.
Let’s do the math, you and I. I’m fifty-six years old. If I’m lucky, if I don’t get hit by a bus tomorrow or piss off the wrong woman in a bar, I’ve got maybe fifteen, twenty good years left on this planet. Fifteen years. That sounds like a long time, doesn’t it? It’s not. It’s a goddamn weekend. It’s a handful of summers. It’s the time it takes for a good dog to get old and die. It’s nothing.
And we paint ourselves this beautiful, comfortable illusion that it’s a lifetime. We tell ourselves we have time to go out and do the things we love.
We fucking don’t.
If you are not, right now, in this ugly, beautiful, and completely fleeting moment, engaging with the things that make your blood sing, you are losing out. And I’m not talking about the quiet, respectable bullshit they sell you as a life. I’m not talking about hanging your hat on being a “grandparent,” a quiet, supporting role in someone else’s goddamn movie. I’m talking about being the primary. The main character in your own beautiful, ugly, and completely necessary story. The kind of self-love that isn’t about a bubble bath, but about the quiet, revolutionary act of finally, after all these years, living without the goddamn titles.
If you’re not doing that, you’re just a dying animal, sitting in a burning room, talking about the pretty color of the flames.
We like to think we have time. We could get hit by a bus tomorrow, and this whole stupid, magnificent, and completely absurd show could be over, just like that. The curtain comes down, the lights go out, and all the things you were going to do, all the words you were going to say, they just die with you, a quiet, pathetic little whimper in the dark.
If you want to say something to a person, fucking say it. Spit it out, even if your teeth rattle and your voice shakes. If you want to go somewhere, if you want to do something, and you have the goddamn means to do it, then fucking do it. Now. Not tomorrow, not next week, not when you retire. Now. Do not delay your life because you think you have time. Don’t tell me about the grandkids. The grandkids will be fine. They’re just another beautiful, respectable, and completely soul-crushing excuse to die quietly in your cage. The kids left for a reason; let them live their own goddamn lives.
That time you think you have, it could be cut short at any given moment.
So I urge you, I am on my goddamn knees in the dirt and the filth of this world, and I am begging you: live now.
Because when Death does find you—and he will, he’s a patient, quiet man who’s been watching you your whole life—he better find you fucking alive.
He better not find you in a corner somewhere, defeated by what you went through, a quiet, broken animal waiting for the end. He better not find you sitting in a goddamn recliner, your eyes glazed over, watching a movie about a life you were too scared to live, scrolling through the highlight reel of other people’s phony lives on your phone.
He better not find you wasting away in this beautiful, ugly, and completely miraculous paradise of a world that we have to live in. A world that other people, in other, shittier corners of this planet, would kill to have a piece of.
He better find you with a drink in your hand and a half-finished story on your lips. He better find you with your heart pounding from a good fuck or a good fight. He better find you with dirt under your fingernails, with a scar on your face, with the beautiful, ugly, and completely honest smell of a life that has been lived, not just endured.
Because let me just tell you, you don’t get a second chance at this beautiful, ugly, and completely honest shitshow.
This is it.
