There are many things I think of at the end of the night. The thoughts I think of while staring at the ceiling are countless, but the ones that occupy my mind the most are life and death. People always say that death is the scary one out of the two, but I believe they are both equally alarming.

Everybody you know and love, everything you appreciate, and everything you enjoy doing is going to be taken away from you one day. Such thoughts keep me awake at night.

To most, death is an escape. For me, it’s one I don’t want. I don’t want to leave the world that I’ve known all my life to go to a place unknown to me. Death, to me, is just another panic attack. Another day of me not living because I’m afraid of what is to come and how it comes.

Death is a limitation. It limits me from living because it makes me more aware of my surroundings, and because of that I sometimes miss the little things in life. Death is fear. Death is an emotional pain. Death hurts everybody because it takes the people that we love and have been with our whole life away from us. The world you know is gone in an instant. The people you love are gone. To me, death is unforgiving.

Life isn’t much better. From the moment you take your first breath, you’re already dying. Then for the rest of your life you have to work your hardest to even truly live. In this world you can’t really experience life unless you work super hard for it or unless it’s handed to you on a silver platter. To me, that’s not fair at all.

You have to worry if you’ll be successful, if you’ll fit in, if people will be proud of you, and if at the end of your life you can truly say that you lived. I know people who have worked hard their entire life and they still get the smallest slice of the pie.

We’ve gone our entire lives trying to free all kinds of people, but none of us are truly free. We’ll never be. We all wake up, do the same routine everyday and we never see it as a problem. How do you think people in the future will be? Kids go to school for so many hours a day, grown-ups go to work every day, and parents juggle the responsibility of getting their kids there and then getting themselves to work. Do you really think we’ll change? Do you think we’ll ever get to be free from this cycle of life and let ourselves truly live?

The only things that make it worth it would be the people around you. The feeling of happiness around you is the only thing that keeps you alive. The special moments in life make it worth it, but at the end of the day you can’t help but think about what your true purpose of being here is. You lie there and think to yourself — what’s the point of working hard toward something that won’t matter in a century?

To me, life is an endless cycle.

(Cianna is a senior at Harlan County High School and a student in John Henson’s English/writing class)