1 Chapter 1

The whistling of the kettle brings me back to the present. I tend to get lost a lot nowadays. Lost, and asleep - just not asleep enough. I pour some simmering water into my brown and beige coffee mug and add a spoonful of coffee powder to it before stirring. I like my coffee black, strong and hot - such that the first sip jostles you wide awake. Like many others, I do not need caffeine to stay awake but I do need it to get through my day - everyday - much like everybody else needs to be addicted to do something to get through life, and addictions need not necessarily mean mind altering substances. They can be anything from drugs to beliefs, in fact, one of the most common addictions and what would be an unpopular opinion, would be religion itself - God - a force far more powerful than you, that you have no knowledge of apart from whatever has been told to you by a couple of people, absolutely no access to, and not a reason to believe in apart from the few claims that have been made by people that are such firm believers of the entire theory, they might as well be snorting the knowledge at the point. But then I wouldn't speak more of it. Personal attacks is the last thing I would want in whatever I have left of this life. Maybe somebody else would have chosen letting their opinion be known if their lifespan was shortened out of the blue, but well, I believe it would bring nothing but nuisance and trouble.

I wonder how many people, apart from me, have the privilege / luxury of knowing about the manner of their own deaths as precisely as they know how they like their coffee, or, their death date and birthday alike. Honestly, it's not of much help - just like Baz Luhnmann had said," The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never cross your troubled mind, the kind that blind side you at 4:00 p.m. on some ideal Tuesday." Come to think of it, I suppose I have always concerned myself with stuff that hardly even matters in real life - things like stressing over political decisions i would do nothing about apart from debating and discussing them over and over till they wear out, or, things like how I like my coffee - things that hardly matter right now, and probably never will. What does matter, is something we so easily disregard and romanticize and risk - our lives.. and our deaths. And we always think we have absolute control over everything, but we do not. And we think that today is as good as any day for dying but, in truth, it's not.