All of us get some say into how we die. Obviously, a few of us will get cancer, will get hit by cars, will succumb to bad genes. And there are the obvious cases – the extremists, the alcoholics, the addicts – who are sort of forcing the issue. But for the rest of us, the even-keeled with average genes, we choose a little bit of how we die everyday.

A life lived long is a series of a million micro-choices made everyday: to live at the risk of death. Some of us love wine, and enjoy it with innocence on a Saturday afternoon and a Tuesday evening, but the alcohol will supernaturally diminish our bodies. Some of us love to tan, and lay without precaution under a UV 11 sun, but the radiation will wear us out. Some of us love to smoke, to inject our bodies with artificial substances, to wear the fast fashion clothing imbued with forever chemicals. What we love will kill us, and we choose to love it. Everyday we choose poisons, and toxins, and assassins because the alternative is loving nothing. The alternative is to stand still on a turning earth swirling with pollutions, and vipers, and bombs.

There’s a beauty in it – an homage of sorts to the people who didn’t get a choice. The people whose vice was chocolate and would, going back, spend one last day knee-deep in Ferrero Rocher. To get a choice can be a cursed, shackling responsibility or it can be a blessing – to have a stake at all in how we will break down at the end of this. To be able to cut open your life and count the glasses of wine and the slices of cake and the afternoons on the beach like rings of a tree.

And obviously there is the absence of it too: we might choose how we die by abstaining entirely – to wait until our body fails out of necessity. But how much of that is choosing to die at the risk of living? How much of this responsibility is something to simply hold, like a rock picked up on a walk, rather than a puzzle to solve?

We all want to live as long as we can. But as we speak, our cells could be dividing. The semi that will cause our crash could be fueling up the next town over. The clot could be forming inside of us. How bad are any of us, really, for choosing to make the choice?

No one was meant to observe their mortality this closely, this frequently – or perhaps they were. Surely history is littered with run on sentences, and short perfunctory statements: people who saw 3 centuries and people who never grew to their full heights. I am such a person, walking slowly with the stricken, being lapped by those who’ve never had to think about dying alone (and in what state) in their 30s. Perhaps this inspection is the only way to truly realize that it doesn’t matter if the powers that be think I’m a little fat. Or if the travel influencer would balk at my love of possessions at the cost of wandering the globe. Or if anyone at all thinks I’m living right.

The consequences are far greater than they realize. I am not plotting towards rudimentary milestones. I am considering what they haven’t. There is no rush – or perhaps there is – but it isn’t all that up to you. There is no living right, there is no living well. There are the margins of error, of course, but none of us know shit about what it all adds up to – if there’s even time for it to matter at all.

All you know at the start of each day is that today will choose what kills you – or a little of it at least. And if you’re very very lucky, you’ll get to live to see the results.