when i was younger, i used to have a toy.

it was a plastic computer, with a mouse that didn’t work

it was red along the edges, saturated grossly,

like most children’s toys.

i think it had green on the keys -

or was it yellow?

the colors have bled from the vault of my mind

like watercolors, washed out with time.

but the love is still there.

i adored that toy with every fiber of my being

but i don’t remember what it did.

the details are hazy

and i think i might be crazy because

was it ever there at all?

did i actually have a toy computer with a broken mouse

saturated in blues and purples like

one big bruise?

was the love ever there at all?

is it my mind who is the deceiver,

lying to me with every tripping flutter

of the pulse in my wrist

when i see anything

that has to do with

the word

miss?

When the boy on my

cruise from New Orleans

asked, Where are your horns?

I was completely floored.

Where are my horns, I thought,

clasping my hand over

the Star of David necklace

around my neck.

I went back to my room,

made a cup of tea, and

said goodnight to Grandma.

Gute Nacht, my grandmother

said to me, before tucking

me into bed.

Grandma, I said, has anyone

ever asked you if you had horns?

Oh yes, said Grandma,

back in Austria anyone wearing

a star was called a beast. But you

know what?

I looked cautiously

at my grandma

and raised my eyebrows.

The ones with the thickest horns

are the ones that are most

likely to survive.

I glanced up at my

grandmother,

a 92-year old Holocaust

survivor, and suddenly my

eyes became heavy

and closed.

That night I dreamt about

winning. About standing on

a first place podium

holding a golden trophy,

with passion in my eyes.

Humanity died fast when the list appeared.

First came the suicides. When you see yourself at the bottom of the list that supposedly represents all of humanity, it’s hard not to lose hope.

Then came the murders. Of the people who had discovered the list. The people who kept it running. Some decided that the list was fake, and that anyone who believed in it deserved death.

Eventually, we stopped. Killing and fighting and tearing each other apart. At least for a while.

I was born with a number on my hand. I don’t remember what it was. No one can tell me, because you can only see your own number. But right now, my number is 3,425,007. Out of the eight billion people on the earth.

That’s one of the better numbers. My mom told me once that her number had dropped to 6,331,909. I thought she was kidding until I heard the gunshots. One that took my sister. And one that took my mom.

I don’t know why my mom killed my three-year old sister. I don’t know why she killed herself. And I don’t know what the number on her corpse was. Because as far as I know, your number stays with you forever. Even when the only one who can see it is dead, it lives on.

I’d like to imagine my little sister was 1 on the list. Maybe 2, for that time she killed my fish by pouring too much food into its bowl. But other than that, she was perfect. I can’t understand why the cosmic power that decides where we stand would put her at anything less.

No one else understands, either. Everyone has their own idea of the list. I guess that before it showed up, people were content with their own views of right and wrong. But now that someone is deciding for us, we’ve gotten desperate.

A few streets from my house is a church. The sign outside says “God forgives all-Numbers are warnings, not punishments”. The church three blocks away is telling me to ignore the list entirely, that it’s a construct of the devil made to deceive us and turn us away from God. And the synagogue on Bailey Cove promises a way to move your number up the list, and a better understanding of why you were ranked where you were in the first place.

My mom and I went to a church back in our hometown that told us we had to be honest with our numbers and share them with the world. The next church we tried told us the list was a gift from god, to tell us when to repent. My mom loved that answer, but I wasn’t sure. I stopped going to church as soon as I could, and mom’s death didn’t do anything to persuade me to return.

I’ve always wondered who’s at the top of the list. You’d think they’d be on the news all the time, sharing their five-step plan to being a good human being. But only one person has ever claimed to have 1 embedded in their skin. Anton Icara, famous actor, TV personality, and philanthropist. When the first rape allegations came, the woman who had submitted them had been completely ostracized. After all, this man was the pinnacle of human decency. No accusations could ever stand up to that little number on his hand.

Security cameras don’t see your number, though. All they saw was Anton’s fifteenth murder. The same woman who had tried to tell the world what he was really like lay dead on the floor, a knife in her chest.

I wonder sometimes if he really was the best person on earth. If our own view of morality fell apart somewhere along the way, and he wasn’t lying when he told us that he was the only person who understood what perfection was. It seems plausible. When I was a kid, I wondered why the Bible banned so many things that sounded perfectly moral to me. Maybe the list works the same way. Maybe that’s why giving to charity didn’t move my number up the list, but watering my houseplants did. Anton Icara might have been right.

Then again, if he was lying, why did we all believe him?

I don’t know why the number on my hand is there. I don’t know what it means, what it wants from me. I don’t know who decides our numbers. And I don’t know what will happen when I die.

All I know is when this bullet goes through my head, I won’t be looking at the number on my hand.

What do you want?

Like what do you really want in life?

I know it sounds like a silly question, but it’s one of the most important questions you should ask yourself. It truly is.

Because if you don’t know what you want in life, then how are you going to get it?

It’s like wanting to travel somewhere, having your car and your passport ready, but having no destination.

What’s going to happen is that you won’t go anywhere, or worse you’ll find yourself driving around without any destination...

And that might be the case...

... For my travel analogy, that means that the car you’re driving is extremely hot and uncomfortable.

And you might say, if that’s the case, then why bother with it?

And people really do ask that question, so might you…

For the past month or so, I’ve been thinking a lot about life

And when people say that, they usually mean what they want to do in life.

Whether that be their career

Or relationships

Or entertainment or leisure

But I’ve been thinking differently.

Of course, I’ve been thinking about those things but I’ve also been thinking about how much of your life is really yours.

How much of your life is really being lived to its full potential?

Are you living?

Or are you just existing?

On average you’re gonna get about 79 years on this big rock called Earth

If you live in Monaco, it’s closer to 90. If you live in Chad, you’ll be lucky to get 50

Regardless, we don’t get 79 years of freedom. We have responsibilities and things that we can’t ignore.

Most importantly our bodies!

Assuming you sleep 8 hours a night on average about a third of your life over 26 years is gonna be spent sleeping.

So right away, we’re down from 79 to 53 but it doesn’t stop there.

Chances are if you’re reading this prose, you have gone to school or are going to one.

In the United States, you’ll go for at least 12 years

8 hours a day 5 days a week for 36 weeks a year.

This amounts to 17,280 hours spent just inside the school building…

But wait, we also have to factor in homework and out-of-school activities among other things.

So this is more like 22,000 to 25,000 hours or about 3 years of your life.

If you go to college or university afterwards, make it 5 years less, this means we’re down to 48 years.

Well, all this schooling and money you’ve spent getting a degree has to be put to some use right?

Chances are you’ll try and get a job in the field of whatever it is your degree is in, It’ll probably be a full-time job. So you’ll be working 40 hour weeks pretty regularly if not more than that.

Let’s say you get two weeks of vacation per year. The average person works for about 40 to 50 years of their life…

… So we’ll just go with the average and say 45.

Over your entire life, you’ll work on average about 90,000 hours or about 10 years of your life. We have 38 years left.

Wait, depending on where you live your commute to work will vary, you might drive yourself

You might walk or you might use an Uber or a taxi.

Regardless, your commute to and from work on average takes about one and a half hours a day.

Adding this up over your entire working career. It amounts to 17,500 to 20 hours or about two years of your life.

36 years left.

All of this work and studying really builds up an appetite. So you should probably spend some time eating.

On an average day, we spend about 70 minutes just eating food to survive.

In your 79 years of life, you’ll spend about 32,000 hours just eating or about 4 years of your life.

Down to 32.

Well after you’re done eating you have to clean up and maybe do some chores around the house.

On average you spend about one hour a day doing tasks just around your house

Cleaning up after you eat washing dishes, doing laundry, showering and plenty of other stuff

This amounts to nearly 29,000 hours over the course of your life or about three years.

29 years left.

Eventually, all of that food and water has to leave your body somehow, so, You’ll spend about three months of your life just sitting on the toilet… yeah :|

Of course, we also waste time and we do it pretty well.

Over the course of our lifetimes, we’ll spend about 115,000 hours on our phones or about 13 years.

This, of course, is just your phone. This doesn’t include you watching TV, you playing games among other things.

16 years left.

Assuming you can afford to retire at the average age of 62, You’ll spend the rest of your life living the luxuries of retirement if you can still function properly.

Over 50% of retired people over the age of 65 have some sort of disability.

With 15% of those people having three or more.

Chances are if you are one of these people you’ll be in and out of medical care pretty often, So those final 16 years of freedom you have aren’t exactly freedom.

So overall you have one year in your 79-year life to really and truly do what you want to do

But despite the age, whether you’re young or old, you may be nearing the end of your time with some of the most important people in your life.

For example, while you’re young and in school from the ages of 1 to 18, You’ll most likely be spending nearly every day in the presence of your parents.

After you finish your schooling, your parents are probably in their mid-40s, so they have about 30 years left in their life.

The real world starts to set in. Your job, you’re possible relationships, you’re important things to do in life take priority.

Eventually, if you leave your hometown, you’ll only be seeing your parents around holidays and special occasions. Maybe 10 days a year.

So…

300 days left with the people who brought you into the world, whereas before, you would see them almost every single day.

You have already spent 95% of the time that you will ever spend with your parents in the first 18 years of your life.

And now you only have the remaining 5% for the rest of your life.

At the end of the day, there’s only one thing that matters and that’s your own happiness.

Well, what many people don’t realize is that they do so many things in life just to try and succeed as opposed to fulfilling a purpose.

They work a job they hate for 40 years just to make that extra $30,000 a year so they can afford a car that they only drive to work.

It’s temporary happiness, not genuine happiness.

People who go to school go to become a doctor or just get an education, just because their mom or their dad or somebody else told them to…

… not because they actually want to.

I really hope that every single person reading this Prose entry of mine gets insanely rich and famous so that they could finally realize that this isn’t the point of life.

The point is to be happy with what you’re doing while you’re doing it.

Alright, sure… The 45 working years or however long you’re working is going to be hard to get past…

But what if you don’t hate waking up every day to go to work? What if your work is your happiness?

You see life isn’t a straight path. You can’t map it out perfectly one-to-one. It just doesn’t work like that.

We spend every day planning on what we’re going to do the next instead of just taking in the day for what it actually is.

Sure, we have to eat, duh, but what if we spend that time eating with friends or family or just people who make your life better?

Your commute to work might be long and tedious sometimes but what if you spend that time listening to podcasts or carpooling with coworkers and friends… Then, The 13 years we waste on our phones might seem useless.

… But what if we use that time to build the business you’ve always wanted to or build the brand you’ve always wanted or write a Prose entry to talk to people about the random ideas you get.

You’ll bring so much value to people that you never even thought was possible.

Let’s say you take care of yourself and regularly work out and eat decently well, your chances of being healthy later in life are much more likely and you’ll have much more free time to master the things that you really want whether that be a skill or just relationships with others.

No matter what you or I or any person on this planet does, time doesn’t stop for anyone.

Time is the one thing you cannot get back!

if you lose a lot of money, it’s fine! You can get more.

If your friend decides to turn their back on you, It’s fine! There are millions of people out there in the same situation.

But the time… You can’t get it back. Once it’s gone, It’s gone.

How many days have you spent doing the same mundane tasks that you hate and more importantly when is it going to end?

Life is about choices and every choice you’ve ever made has led you to this exact moment reading this Prose entry.

Given that you only have one life at least in this universe, Why not make your own decisions?

So many people live life predicated on somebody else’s opinion, which is dumb.

People have so many barriers in life, but they aren’t really about money. They aren’t about time

They aren’t about how you look, it’s about opinions.

… Other people’s opinions.

Probably about 90% of people are unhappy because they value someone else’s opinion more than their own.

When you’re old and unable to do the things that you could have when you’re younger, You’ll regret it and regret hurts more than any breakup, failure, or anything else that ever could!

Life doesn’t have to suck, you don’t have to regret everything.

That fear of missing out is a poison!

Instead of living trying to mimic people you see on Instagram or YouTube or social media just live based on your own terms.

Instead of just observing and living passively really start to think about what you do with your time.

Does that mean call your boss and tell him you quit? No; does that mean to drop out of school tomorrow? No.

All it means is to truly decide what you want in life and put yourself in the right direction.

It’s not gonna happen overnight. That’s not the point. There would be no journey then.

As cliche as it sounds, your 79-year journey here is very short.

Sure. It’s technically the longest thing you’ll ever do, But the universe is 13.8 billion years old.

If the universe’s history was condensed down into 24 hours, the world as we know it with cars and airplanes and civilization as we know it would only come into existence in the very last second.

Block out any and all negativity in your life. And once you can truly realize that the only opinion that matters is your own.

Life can get pretty clear, and the noises inside your head get pretty quiet! :)