If We Were Gone

Here’s a thought of mine that I've been stewing over: the world would be much better without me. Without you. Without everyone. It's a simple concept really, yet it has taken so long for me to grasp. Now, I have come to this conclusion, and you cannot persuade me otherwise.

Humans are selfish creatures. We only care about ourselves, hurting and lying and manipulating our way through life just to get what we want. We are all the main characters in our own fantastical stories, seven-billion books in a library much too small to contain us. Everything, everyone we encounter is just another side-character or stepping stone, or tool to be used and discarded when it’s most convenient for us. I've seen it all before.

We are foolish. We walk into the grocery store and think that the whole world is looking at us, judging us, critiquing us, when really, the person across the aisle couldn’t care less what the color of our shirt is or the brand of our shoes. It is hard to believe that once, we were all little kids, innocent and wide eyed, so ready to see the world in all of its vibrant colors and mysteries. And now, everyone says, “Slow down.” They say it because they have crested the peak of understanding and realized that the view isn’t quite what they thought it would be. Not as colorful. Not as mysterious. Just black and white. And at that moment, at the top of the peak, you realize how dark the world truly is and that it doesn’t matter what you do or how you do it or who you hurt because we are all born to die. That is the moment when your light, once so beautiful and curious and young, is snuffed out, by the cold bitter breeze of reality, and it becomes okay to steal somebody else's coat. This is what happens to us. It is an unavoidable thing, lest you find some Higher Power to cling to, and unfortunately many do not, so we are swept along, fighting and clawing mercilessly at one another in the current.

And so on and on it goes, this depressing merry-go-round of conniving whims and scheming ambitions, leaving none unscathed in its endless circuit, least of all Mother Earth. She is the most blameless of us all, yet we torture her anyway, and do it with frightening ease. We scar her skin, we cut her limbs, we make her bleed with tar and oil and smoke. We make her ugly, and we don’t even care anymore; we’re not surprised. Our hearts, so full of greed and desire, have no more room left inside to be concerned for our old, constant friend. They say to her, “Sorry, we’re booked. Maybe come back in a few weeks, and then I’ll start caring about you.” We never do, though. The earth has been so thoughtful, so nourishing to us, while we use her, and use her, and use her until we are done with her, and then we die only for another person to start right where we left off. And later on, comes the grand finale, our final, inevitable parting gift to the world. We will eagerly mash our red buttons and perish in a blaze of glory, an extravagant and showy bang as is our ostentatious nature. We will be nothing more than a mushroom cloud of vaporized ashes. But the earth, finally free of her two legged captors, will be given no respite, because she will have been turned into a shivering, weeping husk, blinking in empty space, where she will die with only the meekest whimper.

We are selfish, spoiled, silly children who will never grow up; who think we can have our own way at any and all costs. So that's why I think the world would be better off without us, because it deserves so much more than this.