I like to think of the endings of things. Sometimes it makes me appreciate the current state of things, knowing things are just going to get worse. That sounds a bit depressing and cynical, but I mean… nothing lasts forever and endings are rarely happy ones. We wouldn’t be so afraid of them if that were the case. The only endings that I think about that are usually positive are movies and television shows. Being in screenwriting class for a year has kind of helped make it easy to predict how the rest of the movie’s going to play out, which can be both a good thing and a bad thing. On one hand, I’m paying attention to foreshadowing hints and some minute details in the story that most people take for granted. On the other hand, I’m almost always ruining the experience of watching the movie by guessing the ending of it 30 minutes in. It wouldn’t be so bad if I wasn’t correct most of the time. Anyway, movies are endings that I’m okay with thinking about. It’s the other things that are becoming an issue.

I wonder why I have to imagine the way things would end for certain situations. It may be that “knowing” a result reduces the anxiety of well… not knowing. I’m not the surprise type of guy and I would prefer people didn’t surprise me, because I like knowing how things are going to play out beforehand. When I was in school I always asked people who’ve had the same classes as me before I did what we did, because knowing how a certain class was going to play out made me feel more at ease. It’s not like I really prepared or did anything with the information. I just liked knowing. My obsessive need to think about how things will end might just be a sign that I want things to end or that I have a hard time accepting being in the present. I’m not a psychologist and even if I was, it’s a bit difficult to analyze yourself.

The endings that bother me, but I still feel the need to think about are things that involve people. I think about how certain relationships will end, even sometimes when they’ve just begun. I sometimes wonder how the end of humanity will play out. In that scenario I often root for nature’s side of the battle. I actually like to think about how little a footprint we’ll leave once we no longer exist. It is interesting how quickly Mother Nature likes to take over and it makes these worries about “saving the planet” quite funny. I don’t believe that we’re killing our planet. I truly believe it’s trying to kill us. That’s not too upsetting, because look at what humanity’s done in the small fraction of time we’ve been given here on this planet. Yes, I said given because I think the Earth is allowing us to live, despite how horrible we are. I mean, we’ve only lived for a couple thousand years and we’ve had countless wars, wiped out ecosystems, blew up entire cities, and commit atrocities to one another. Earth should’ve wiped us out a long time ago, but she’s forgiving and I’m okay with that.

I have a hard time keeping on topic… I’m almost sure I have ADD. Anyway, then we get to the real depressing endings that I can’t help but not to think about. The end of me. This is in many different forms as well. Sometimes it’s a first person perspective. One minute I’m on a hospital bed surrounded by family crying over me and the next… complete darkness. No more sound, no more family, no more world. It’s a chilling thought that can cause a severe panic attack at just the thought of it. In fact, while writing this I can feel my heart rate go up. There’s also the third person omniscient version of my imagining of my end. Which consists of how people would react to me no longer being here. Some people will be sad, others will pretend to be sad for the sake of not looking like an asshole (unfortunately I often fit under this category because with my different views on death I rarely see it as a sad thing for others to experience it. In fact, it just seems really peaceful and sometimes I’m… I don’t think I should finish that.), and then there are those who just don’t care. The ones who pretended to be  sad move on with their lives right away and those that were legitimately sad will move on relatively quickly, because I would’ve stressed that I don’t want people to waste their lives worrying about the loss of someone else’s.  I would want them to move on relatively quickly and definitely not to idealize me when I’m dead. If I was a dick to you, remember me as a dick because I was one. If I was just a generally nice guy, then remember that. A lot of times people take out the bad things that also made them who they were and I believe, personally, that it is disrespectful to not remember someone for who they truly were.

I was also thinking about how I would end this article when I first begun, and I thought “Hey it would be pretty funny to talk about how I was thinking about the ending to this article since it’s about thinking about endings.” So, there you go. The end.

-Tristan Jimenez