Life: Spoiler Alert

Congratulations! Now that you’re living, here are a few tips from someone who’s been doing it, with partial success, for more than 55 years | Fiction | Fresh Soup

When you’re a kid, people are always asking you questions: Are you tired? What did the teacher say? Who’s your best friend? As an anxious boy, I used to sort the questions into easy ones (“Did you eat the sandwich Mom made you?”) and difficult ones (“When are you going to start packing your own backpack?”). Out of all the questions, the one I considered the most difficult and complicated was, “How’s life?” This might be the place to mention that an average day of my childhood included climbing a tree, finding a treasure, getting slapped by my neighbor Yossi, and fighting and making up with Anat at least three times. Over the years, I’ve learned that instead of trying to quantify the sum total happiness of all the events that make up my day so that I can provide a scientifically accurate answer, I can always get away with “Fine, thanks!” Because even if that answer is never really, one hundred percent, true, it satisfies the asker and propels you smoothly to the next, easier question. Except that here at Alphabet Soup, we don’t make do with polite and efficient answers. So, “how’s life,” you ask? Here’s my honest answer.

Illustration by Ofra Kobliner

Living is the easiest thing in the world. Your mom pushes, a man in a white coat on the other side of the uterus pulls, and out you pop. Someone cuts your umbilical cord. You start crying. The lights are too bright. Air enters your lungs. Air exits your lungs. Air enters your lungs. Air exits your lungs. Air enters your lungs. Air exits your lungs. Piece of cake. You got this. You’re alive.

Living is the easiest thing in the world. Surviving—that’s another story. They attack you with pitchforks, they attack you with batons. They attack you with axes, with diseases, with cars. They come at you with tsunamis, with earthquakes, with a stroke. With a malignant tumor, with a benign tumor, malignant tumor, benign tumor, malignant tumor. Let’s see you get out of that alive.

If you’ve somehow managed to survive this far, now is the time to step things up and try to start caring: about the cat wailing in the yard, the baby wailing on the neighbor’s balcony, the homeless guy wailing on the sidewalk across the street. I know, it’s not easy. Surviving takes instincts: a bear chases you, you run. But caring? That’s for advanced players. Breaking up a fight between two strangers on the street. Giving the salami sandwich you packed for lunch to a hungry-looking guy with holes in his shirt. Remembering that salami is thick slices of a cow that didn’t ask to die. Understanding that you’re part of something bigger, that we’re all one living, injured, bloodied human fabric. That this disease called caring might be rare, but once you catch it, it’s incurable.

Death is a fact. The only questions are when and how: in the crib, by drowning, from a mysterious virus, drunk on the way home from a bar, in a senseless crash on the highway. When it comes, it’s almost predictable and, at the same time, kind of surprising. And then it goes quiet.

Translated by Jessica Cohen