Si, ch’io vorrei morire. Yes, I want to die. It’s a piece by Monteverdi. I think about it a lot these days. Ch’io vorrei morire, I want to die. Now, with love, I kiss the mouth of my lover...

But I don’t want to die. Do I want to be dead? More than anything else, I want to be dead... I don’t want to be alive anymore. I don’t feel like I’m alive, anyway... but to be dead... and to die... are not the same. I know that now. That’s because it’s not the afterlife, or lack thereof, I don’t really know—it’s not what’ll happen after death that I fear. It’s Death itself. I’ve seen death dimly reflected—I’m afraid to face it. I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker, and in short, I was afraid. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, T.S. Eliot.
People used to say they’d seen death, and they probably believed it. But they were all wrong—death isn’t a bloated dead grandmother in her coffin frightening children who sneak a glance at her, there’s no death in graveyards or funerals or ashes or bones or corpses. Death is feeling yourself sink slowly into the core where real existence dwells, after you’ve worn your way through the rind that’s Life—sinking in and knowing it and not being able to do anything about it since you’ve been dying since you were born. Professor Weston’s philosophy... Perelandra, C.S. Lewis.

I do read a lot these days. There’s not much else I can do, besides feeding myself and sleeping when I must. I’m compelled to read. I feel like if I stop filling my head with new knowledge and insights and opinions, even for just a minute, that’ll be it, I’ll just give up and die. But as long as there’s something I can keep learning, and I know that, I can keep hanging on. That’s the only thing I can do anymore—hang on. Because I don’t want to die.

I’m hardly the last one alive. There are lots of things alive here, even though to call them “alive”—to call this “living” feels like a blasphemy. There are... lots of things... alive... things that move, and breathe... but...
It’s like hue shifts on pictures. If you shift it halfway around the spectrum, it’s completely unrecognisable. But if you only shift it a little bit, you can see which things used to be red, which ones were blue—you can tell what it’s supposed to look like, and you can tell it’s wrong. That’s what earth is like now. It’s shifted a few degrees, and I can recognise the earth I was born on in this planet I now find myself on. I still remember how plants used to be green, and the way flowers looked, and different animals, and myself, because things now look the same—just shifted. It’s disgusting... I wish it had shifted further than just a few degrees.  Everything would be easier if this was totally different from “life” and “earth” and “flowers” and “love”, and if everything was totally unrecognisable. But because it’s so close to life, earth, love, I keep trying to make it really be that in my mind and it’s not. My god... it’s not.

Sometimes I wake up and... I just want to destroy it all. It’s so wrong, so disgusting, so blasphemous, I hate it so much. I wonder if there is a hell apart from the one I live in—there I am calling it living—it’s not living, this isn’t life at all. I want to leave it behind, even if that means going to a real hell with fire and agony—if there is one—I think I would prefer it to this, because at least fire and agony and pain are things I can understand, things I’ve experienced for real. Am I saying I want to go to hell? I’m saying I don’t want to be alive anymore, I want to be dead—I want to be dead and be anywhere you go when you’re dead, heaven or hell or limbo, I don’t care, as long as I’m not here. But I don’t want to die.

This is called “ultraviolet spring,” the period that follows after the “winter” induced by impact. To put it simply, impact caused an enormous dust cloud all over the globe, blocking out sunlight and killing off a decent percentage of life on earth.  After a few years the dust cloud settled, and the return of previously normal amounts of ultraviolet radiation were too much for plants and animals that had learned to manage without them during winter. The nitric oxide in the atmosphere also managed to pretty much kill the ozone-- so ultraviolet radiation was even higher than it had been before—much higher, and it kept on rising. This is “spring.”  It finished off pretty much everything that was left, but there are still lots of plants and animals and all sorts of things. Like me. There’s not really any chance for reproduction since all plant and animal life has been disgustingly mutilated by such a constant barrage of radiation, which means that in a few years, at best, everything will die for real. No more plants. No animals, no humans, no more anything except dust. In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. Genesis 3:19.

I am the luckiest of my race. I’m the only one condemned to this obscene parody of hell, the only one who’s not out in eternity somewhere resting or rejoicing or suffering, the only one who’s not finished, the only one who has to go on “living” day by day, minute by minute. But still, I am the most fortunate, on my own perverted scale of values—I am the only one who has not tasted death. That—that makes the other things I endure—worth it. I will face anything if I only may not die. I am sometimes glad none of the others are here, because my shame is only mine and sharing it would be... what? Sin? Blasphemy? I do mention blasphemy a lot. That’s because reality itself is blasphemy now. Blasphemy is the unforgivable sin and sin is cutting off from God—it does make sense. Because the way things are...

I don’t want to talk about it anymore.