I have a friend that I loathe, but it seems like I will never be able to separate myself from her. We barely even have a nice, endearing conversation. Instead, we argue. We always do. Sometimes it’s about silly things, like the shirt I wore on last Sunday, or the brand of pizza I ordered yesterday. She’s weird, and sometimes she lied, but I specifically hate her so much when she said truth.
Like today. My grandmother was ill and I felt terrible because last Saturday, I went to a boring discussion and I ended up came home earlier and I used her as an excuse. Sorry, I should go home, I should accompany my grandmother to the doctor, I said. Oh, sure, get well soon for your grandmother!, they nodded and let me go. Two days later, she became sick.
“It’s not because of you.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“I mean not entirely.” She smirked. I frowned.
“What do you mean by that?”
“What do I mean? Don’t disappoint me. You did make her as an excuse.”
“But that’s — it’s impossible to cause the illness.”
“Yeah, scientifically. And logically. But still, you made her as an excuse.”
This is what I meant that I hate her when she speaks nothing but truth. I sighed.
“Is it that bad?”
“Well, actually not, if your grandmother didn’t sick after that.”
“You’re not being logical right now.”
“I know. But am I wrong, though?”
I shut my mouth. She intentionally made her last sentence sounds like that stupid meme. I do indeed feel dejected after my grandmother actually got sick, not because I made her as an excuse. When I did that, I felt a trace of guilt inside me, but it didn’t stop me for doing it. Is it right to do that? Now I think it’s not right, but what if my grandmother weren’t sick?
“I don’t know.” I said, finally.
“What don’t you know?”
“Whether it’s right or not.”
“What do you know?”
I think about it for a while.
“Not many.”
“Wrong. You know nothing.”
“How did you know?”
“I know.”
“How do you know?”
“I just know.” She smirked, again. “If there’s one thing I know, it’s that. That you know nothing. Sometimes it surprised me how people live life without knowing anything. People who live are people who lost. They don’t even know why they lost, and where they lost.”
“Maybe we live in a spiral.”
She laughed. “You read Junji Ito too much.”
“He’s great.”
“I don’t have any objection.”
“If we know nothing, why do we live?”
“Why do you ask me?”
“I just want to.”
“We live to be immortal. At least, our genes want to be immortal, and to do that, they should replicate. To be able for them to replicate, you should find yourself a mate and produce offspring.”
“We live to have sex?”
“No, Idiot. To reproduce. That’s not necessarily mean sex.”
“But that’s the way to reproduce?”
“Not really.”
“Should we at least know something to live?”
“Apparently, no.”
“How about the knowledge to eat, to sleep, and to live? Are you saying it’s not necessary?”
She gave this some thought. “You got the point. Let’s say those kind of knowledge is the basic knowledge and it’s the precondition to be able to live. But after you know that, what else do you know? Is there anything?”
It’s my turn to gave her saying some thought. “I don’t know.”
She nodded, almost too enthusiastic. “That’s the whole point, my friend.”
“Anyway, why did you say our genes want to be immortal?”
“Because they want to continue to exist…? Not that they necessarily want to, but the earth exist and there are environments that act as a precondition, which eventually ‘select’ some things to happen, and events — you can call it random events — happened on earth, so eventually life was created and continued.”
“So life is random?”
“No, not random. It’s a collection of actions — no, of something that happened, and happens, and will happen. You may think about this like this: a graph with so many axis and variables, but they are just many, many like infinite, but they’re not infinite. The variables affect each other, randomly and not-randomly — probably the randomness depends on the scope you look into — and somehow the outcome is life. The outcome is you.”
“So there has to be things and time, at least.”
“Probably. Matter and time — spacetime. Whatever.”
“But cancer cells are already immortal. Maybe they are the most advanced form of life.”
“Yeah. But they destroy the body they are in, and they can’t live outside the body.”
“Yes, they can. Henrietta Lacks’ can.”
“Yeah, but they are artificially kept alive.”
“What do you mean by artificial?”
“Being helped by another being to be able to live.”
“Aren’t we all? I mean we breathe and most of the oxygens are from microbes and trees.”
She gave this some thought. “Being helped by another conscious being to be able to live.”
“Still, aren’t we all? I raised by my parents. I bought food that are made by cooks, and the raw materials are grown by farmers. What is consciousness anyway? Maybe the next form of life is the cell doesn’t control an individual, but the whole population. I don’t know if that makes sense.” I continued. “Maybe in the future, even when there’s a mega catastrophe and most of human and another beings are dead, Henrietta’s cells will continue to exist because the humans remain, the population, attempt to.”
“…”
“I think we’re not only know nothing. We are nothing.” I said after we stayed silence for a while.
“Yeah. We are aggregates of atoms, but most of atoms are empty space.”
“From a distance, most things look beautiful.”
“Are you re-read the book again?” She frowned. “You have read it for 13 times now.”
I shrugged. “I just want to.”
“…”
“I changed my mind. How do we know we are nothing? We saw that atoms are mostly just empty space. But that’s what we saw, right? If we can see electricity or other form of energy visually, will atoms seen as full? After all, we sense things with our senses, with our body. We think with our brains and they’re part of the body, too. We feel emotions in our brain. We are limited by our own body. Maybe our mass makes us exist. Our heat. The interaction between energies within us and outside us.”
“You’re right.”
“I know. But I still don’t know anything.”
I smiled at myself.
