Sometimes I think things...

“Fascinating race, the Weeping Angels. The only psychopaths in the universe to kill you nicely. No mess, no fuss, they just zap you into the past and let you live to death. The rest of your life used up and blown away in the blink of an eye. You die in the past, and in the present they consume the energy of all the days you might have had, all your stolen moments. They’re creatures of the abstract. They live off potential energy.”

And so comes the question: In reality, can we kill somebody by letting them live to death?

We’re so busy trying not to die sometimes, that we never really get the chance to live to death. Maybe you can’t kill someone by letting them live to death. Maybe you open their eyes and give them opportunity by letting them live to death. Living to death is something we don’t always do. We’re so careful, so afraid that any second we could turn a corner and get shot by a murderous sociopath, or that we’ll trip and fall and hit our face and jam our nose into our brain. As the anxieties mount, each gets more absurd, less important, less likely. Yet we line them up, one by one, gathering them and arranging them neatly on little shelves lining the walls of our minds. We cultivate them, feed them little bits of credibility, in order to keep them alive. Why we keep them I live is beyond me, yet we continue to show them allegiance. And so we spend our days preparing ourselves and setting little traps for death, and time and time again we thwart death, sidestep it, miss it by inches. But we can also thwart it by living. Isn’t it so, that if you’re living, you aren’t dead? What a thought! True, there is the streak of recklessness that some hold, taking their lives for granted; yet when we care for our lives rather than for our deaths we are far better off. We don’t have to care too much or not at all. A middle ground, in this case, is the safest place to be. So how about it, shall we live to death?