As I was walking home, looking at the ground to avoid looking at the great grey sky, drizzling rain, like little bits of our souls seeping out and spitting in our faces, I saw, on the floor, a guinea-fowl feather; grey with white spots at the end, pretty, and took my mind off the misery of this bleak world for a moment, that is until I realised it was no feather, just a sweet wrapper; grey and trodden into the road, littered as we litter the world. I questioned the world then. I questioned it, not for the first time, because when you see such misery as that, grey wrapper, discarded like the pieces of ourselves we no longer need, so we throw off, shedding, when you see the cars spurting out their fumes, making this grey world greyer, more miserable, more stenched, what can you do but ask why? The world is bleak enough as it is. Yes it has great mountains and the bluest seas, glorious sunsets, and rainbow coloured waterfalls. It has snow and sun, golden leaves that blow about our feet, and birds that sing and chirp, and dolphins that laugh at us, and yes, such beauty, yes we have this, but… we have the rain. That terrible English rain that drizzles, drenches us, soaks us in our skins. We have the biting cold wind that slices at our faces. And we have people. We have war. We have death and destruction, and pain, and grief, and tears, and our demonic creations. We have nuclear arms that deter by sheer fear. We have weapons, and fighting bodies, and mindless violence. We are people. As people, we make our world bleak enough.

So why do we bother? How to people find meaning in this? How do some people go through their lives, completely oblivious to the shit that they live in? Its pointlessness, futility. How do we keep surviving, despite our pain, and our loss, despite our own destruction? How do people convince themselves to continue?

We go through school, and the good ones stay. We go through college and A-levels and the good ones apply to university. To get a good degree, to get a good job, to have a good life, to support a good family, for them to have a good life, to go to school, to get a degree, to get a good job, to sustain a good family, so that we might enjoy their childhood, and their children’s childhood too, to let us feel that we have accomplished something, to give our lives point, so that we all may die, at peace with ourselves and ready.

We regurgitate what we are told, for exams at school, for summative essays, for job interviews, for promotion, to get the good vicar, to get the best house, to get our kids into the best school. We do well to have ‘the life’ so that we may have kids comfortably, to continue the human race in its futile pointless reign of self abuse and destruction. And why? Because we aren’t ready to die? Because we haven’t accomplished all we wanted to before we died. Because it matters? Because whether we’re ready or not will really affect us in death. Do they think that dying happily; with family all around will make it better? Will stop it? It’s just death. It’s just death.

Death is fine for the dying. It’s just a simple death, and then nothing. No consciousness, no anything. Why would you worry about that? It’s harder for those left behind. Harder for them to live without you. Looking across at your room they would smell you, and hear your laugh echoing down the corridor. And for parents to lose a child; the hardest thing perhaps. The pain of not having them there to watch grow up, to comfort and console when they are afraid. Yes, that is hard. So why have them? So why create, so why continue, when we know we are dying? Because? Because we want it for our own satisfaction. We believe that having children will bring us so much pleasure, our genes want us to, we want to see them flourish. When someone is suicidal we keep them alive, because we love them surely, but because our lives would have to change if they left. It would be hard for us, so we’d rather they stayed with us. We ‘care’ to help fulfil our own lives, our own selfish lives. If there is point in them staying alive, then it gives our lives meaning too.

But there isn’t. You don’t enjoy life. You don’t enjoy being in school, having to write essays, even though you want the good job. You want the good job to make life easier, but you don’t enjoy working all day at university, and not going out because you’re ill and have so much work. You don’t enjoy leaving university, and your friends to go into the world of work, slogging away for hour on hour on hour, to keep that expensive but nice house that you come home to after dark each day, where you look at the pile of washing, and hear the screaming children, and the meat defrosting that you have to prepare for dinner. You don’t enjoy dumping down the heavy loads of shopping, yet feeling no weight leave from your shoulders as you itch blearily tired eyes and close them, for a second, so that you might have peace briefly before the children come down with the nanny who needs paying, who is their real mother because you couldn’t afford to stay at home and besides you’ve been working your whole life so that’s what’s best for you. And then dinner, and then homework, and then patiently getting them ready for bed, and reading them a story and remembering when you were little, when your parents were still alive, and looking to your bedroom that you can no longer sleep in because your husband isn’t there but is off with the secretary, cliché you know, but there it is. You don’t enjoy when they are finally asleep, clearing the mess they made, wishing you had time to dust away the cobwebs, distracted by these you trip and fall, and despite the pain you think, not now not now, but yes now. This isn’t the life you imagined when you were four and commended for your reading, when they all said they had high hopes for you. These hopes are not high, your spirits are not and neither are they in the drinks cabinet. You are not, and will not be happy. You don’t enjoy this, so why continue it?

This isn’t your life. Your life is fun, and yes there are hard times, but they are worth it for the good. But in the end… you’ll die the same death as that woman above there. The same as the cashier in Iceland, bleep, bleep, bleeping. The same as a murderer in jail, the same as your parents, the same as your pet. Why build your life up in such beauty, such expectations – my life wont be like that! I shall be happy! I shall study hard and have the chance to get a good job, but I’ll turn it down for love and travel the world, and then maybe settle down. But you will die the same death as your child, and that will hurt more. You can have a brilliant life, a long life, a dull life, but you will all have an empty death. Whether in the gutter, or in hospital, or in bed surrounded by your family, it’s the same. We all go into nothing. And those left behind will mourn us, or forget us, or forgive us, but that will not affect us. And then in time, they too shall go and your memory will be gone, with theirs, and we are all nothing.

So what does it matter? We can delude ourselves, and distract each other from the eventual pain and loss, for the eventual human sacrifice to the ‘better cause’ or whatever it is then, will be there. I can see that life isn’t all bad, and it isn’t, but it isn’t fulfilling, for what can truly fulfil something as empty as the human race? Blink and our lives are gone. What can fulfil me? What can save me? What can mask cold reality for longer than a week or so? All cover-ups smudge and fade off in the end, leaving the red and blistering spot, pussing and dripping. The human people can never be covered for long before our own weeping will pull off the disguise.

Cover me. Veil me in your belief, that my unbelief can be ignored.