I Don’t Know What Else to Tell You

Your life has a purpose and it doesn’t matter.

by Fernando J. Contreras

When I see a writer working on a script while leafing through a “how-to” book, I think, Such a long road ahead! I picture what it’d be like to start from zero at my age, and it feels like being forced to date after the collapse of a twenty-year marriage. Having to relive fun parts of my youth would now symbolize the return to a less developed state: What’s your favorite music? Do you like to travel? Oh, so you want to change the world? How interesting!

I imagine what it’d be like to be eternal. I bet it’s fun for a while. As you forget the names of your grandchildren and battle to get out of the couch, I’m winning the Olympics at the tender age of ninety-five. Then at ninety-nine. Then again at one hundred and three. It’s a nightmare. Every generation becomes a rerun of the previous one. Friendship and love lose meaning after every relationship is punctuated by an abrupt and hollow ending. Inevitably, human life ceases to exist, and I have to wait billions of years for organisms to turn into worms, worms into fish, fish into amphibians, and so on until the first human walks up straight. Compared to me, this human is an idiot, so I wait a few more thousand years before I can discuss the wonders of the wheel, or before I can try to convince the natives that the sun is not a god but an exploding ball of helium. But I’ve lived through the atomic bomb and nanotechnology, so these topics are not stimulating. No subject can cloud the…