How You’ll Go
I lie awake sometimes and think about how I’m probably going to die. Not in some morbid, actively-planning-it way—just the casual obsession. Under a bus. Choking on pizza. That one ex with the knife. Train tracks. Cancer, obviously. AIDS, though less likely now. A dog with rabies. Sepsis from a cut I didn’t notice. Lungs giving out. Heart just deciding it’s had enough. Or standing on the edge of some high building when everything finally breaks wrong.
The specifics don’t matter. What matters is that it happens to everyone, and it’s genuinely unknowable—could be today, could be sixty years. Could be stupid (stairs, pizza, a moving vehicle) or cosmic (plague, war, malice). The brain keeps spinning on it. Every day is roulette and I’m just going about it like it isn’t.
Steve Cutts made an animation about this. Just a short thing where he catalogs how people probably die, broken down by geography and circumstance. Cute art style, which somehow makes it worse. The banality of mortality mapped out like a data visualization. Where you’re born mostly determines how you’ll go—some places you drown, others you burn, others you just age out slowly. It’s darkly funny in that way where you can’t tell if you’re supposed to laugh.
The animation didn’t fix the 3 a.m. brain spiral. But there’s something about seeing it drawn out, animated, made into content, that makes it less like a personal nightmare and more like a shared condition. I’m not uniquely haunted—I’m just human, living in a place that has its own set of probable endings.
Knowing that doesn’t help. But for some reason it helps.