In 2012, approximately 56 million people died every day. That’s twenty four hours in a day, sixty minutes in an hour, sixty seconds in a day. If you do the math, that’s 86,400 seconds, which estimates to 648.148 corpses per second. I don’t mean to try and play at your mortality or whatever, but if you really put things in perspective, every time you blink or type a letter or read a word enough people to fill 100 MTA busses or 162 dinner tables. This is cold hard math. This is life.

In 2015, on the first day of July, I realized this. A lot of people die. I’m probably over simplifying that, but when I say it hit me like a train, it did. I didn’t wake up today thinking, “Hey! I’m alive. That’s really cool. I beat 56 million people in the race to fulfill every human’s deep down desire to procreate and discover themselves and other things that humans have a deep down desire for. Cool!”. Instead, I woke up this morning with a massive back ache and a deep down desire to watch “How I Met Your Mother”. However, things have a funny way of unfolding, and I’m not really sure how I went from watching Netflix sitcoms to trying to verbalize how I feel about mortality, but I did, so bare with me.

At around 7pm, my best friend Li texted me, informing me that if we were to go to some gathering at some bistro in town today, we would have no issue getting in.The issue in question was that it was an 18 and up party and I was neither 18 nor up. However, being attractive adolescent females make most issues of the like mysteriously disappear into the realm of “they don’t look that young so it’s probably okay and if my boss has a problem I’ll just show them how pretty they are”. Liquor stores, concerts, delis that sell the too infamous bogies (note: a bogie is a cigarette). After the ritualistic tradition of getting ready for about three hours (6,998,400 corpses), we decided to try our luck at this so very irrelevant party.

As we waited on the line, we small talked with girls, got our age questioned, the usual in small town Staten Island. Li was actually 18, but me, two years her junior, felt the all too familiar rush of doing things you weren’t supposed to. The bouncers checked our ID’s, and for the very first time, I got yelled at for not being the right age.
I got in anyway.

What an accomplishment! At the so very exclusive and irrelevant party, there were faces we knew and a lot of faces we didn’t. We did our rounds, awkwardly saying hello to ex-boyfriends who were promoting the party but still not 18, to girls who were nice enough but the minute you turned your back you may as well have been Hitler himself asking for salutes to the Third Reich. The ambiance was a mixture of “I’m trying way too hard” and “Do these high waisted shorts make me look like I have no torso”. The music was awful. It smelled of desperation and pheromones. It wasn’t long until me and Li decided we had better things to do.

So, we ditched the party. So cool, right?! As me and my partner in crime hopped into her beat up Range Rover, we decided that it just wasn’t our scene, but we already knew this due to the skirmish in a club in Queens that very New Year’s Eve that resulted in a sudden change in the definition of “fun”. No longer did it include dancing, or kissing, or both simultaneously. Sorry for the raunchy image. As we beelined for the movies, because that was status quo whenever our plans fell through, I realized that we are the epitome of teenage angst. “Hey man, this party is way too (insert dramatic adverb) boring/stupid/beat. Let’s get out of here and watch a movie.” Christ Almighty, we may as well have been wearing square shaped Ray-Bans and sipping green tea while reading Looking for Alaska and crying about how people just don’t understand how it’s like to be a feminist.

The thing about Li and I is that we weren’t like that. We just didn’t care about those things. Looking for Alaska is a great book, I love green tea, and although my glasses are Warby Parker, they do have a conglomerate grandma/hipster feel to them. Those things were a part of our lives, but they didn’t define us. We weren’t trying to not be cool to be cool, trying to be anything we weren’t. We were violently ourselves, and although we shared some in common, it wasn’t enough to foster one of those superficial friendships. We respected each other’s differences, embraced them even, and in that came a mutual understanding of how we worked. This gave insight into how we, as individuals, worked. I myself was not always very open with people, especially after my diagnosis of clinical major depression and the suicide attempt back in January. But I didn’t have to be open with her, it was almost telepathic. She knew I was hurting, and she didn’t have to accept it or try to make me feel better. She just respected it. She understood. And that is why we are best friends, going to irrelevant parties and going on random road trips to New Jersey in the Range and watching movies at 11pm on Wednesday nights.

So we arrived, bought tickets, and sat in a literally empty theater. This was perfect for us, as we usually commentate movies and crack inside jokes. Here, we wouldn’t be disturbed. The movie itself was probably a catalyst for this essay. I never really tried for school, in fact the last marking period of my junior year I did literally no school work and literally didn’t attend my Intro to Pre-Calc class once (I still, however, managed to get an 80 average). The plot was heart wrenching, about a girl with cancer who dies in the end and her friend who cares about her and doesn’t do his school work to spend time with her and makes her movies and stuff. Although it was a definite catalyst, the movie itself is not important to what I am saying now. What is important is how it made me see that although people die every day, no one decides to live every day. We wake up and want to eat or pee or watch “How I Met Your Mother” or want to kill ourselves or not take our meds or change the world or fall in love or whatever the hell you want to do. You can decide to go sky diving to add an experience to your life, but do you decide to breathe and pump blood through your body and try your very hardest not to die? No! Your selfish little brain is so focused on other things, more fulfilling, more spirit than function. That wonderful auto-pilot is what makes those Netflix binge watches so easy: you don’t even have to focus on breathing.

What I don’t really understand is this: what in evolution decided that these things should be readily taken care of? If there’s a God, did he have a master plan for the sentient, that all the integral functions of our bodies would be taken care of so we can sneak into irrelevant parties to ditch them and watch movies? I want to know, but I guess this is something God and I have to take up when we meet.

The movie was pretty long, about 4 million or so corpses. By the end of it, I was feeling inspired and sentimental and crappy. That was another ingredient to my brain recipe of trying to figure out why we’re here, breathing on auto-pilot. The drive back was even worse. On the way to my house, we sped passed a deer, scaring the living out of me. “Ahhh!”, I screamed. Li responded with, “I hope no one hits and kills that deer.” I hope no one hits and kills that deer either, because that will be another corpse on my conscience, and although I didn’t calculate animals in my grand death theorem I felt oddly responsible for that doe.

Maybe it’s because I’m depressed that I’m taking this way too far into account. The Zoloft 75mg works for me pretty well, and I’m glad to say that I am significantly less depressed. Life has just been too volatile lately, with the break ups and being in love with a boy who will never love me again. It’s taking a toll on my school work, my college application process and the way I see myself. I don’t want to kill myself anymore, which is good, but now I am getting all metaphysical in the way I see life, which is bad. Or good. I haven’t decided yet. Depending on my future field of study, it could be either beneficial. But I hate it, I hate it all. I hate how I can’t feel weird about my life without also thinking about how colleges will think about me feeling weird about my life. Although I am a deeply talented individual, and no, I am not flattering myself (I paint. I sing. I write. I am intelligent. I am kind. Also, sometimes, I could even be beautiful.), there is a sadness in me that is more ancient than the sea. I can’t quite put my finger on why I feel that way.

Unfortunately, I cannot decide to live every day. My brain stem lives, in the most literal sense of the word, for me, controlling my breathing and perfecting the art of beating my heart. However, I can decide that I don’t want to die. Coming from me, I feel that is a progress that is invaluable, and makes me incredibly less anciently sad. When I do kick it, I’m going to ask theoretical God if he really evolved us into sentient beings who have the basics taken care of just to experience the world. Then, I’m going to tell him about all those experiences I’ve had, like the movies and road trips or the parties or falling in love and watching “How I Met Your Mother”. I think he may just be jealous of me.