Yesterday, I found out that my wife’s health condition is worse than we thought, and she has to undergo surgery in a few weeks. She’s been saying she would die pretty soon and that I should be there for the children. That’s troubled me for a few days, and I even told her she was being so negative. And it would be as I imagine.

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There’s a coffee shop on top of a hill near the Thai–Myanmar border. Sitting there, you can see the Myanmar side and its mountains. But that view, that poetic geography, is not the reason I like to go there. The coffee is pretty mediocre, and the food isn’t that great. In the coffee shop, there’s a graduation photo of a teenage girl, maybe early twenties, and a young boy in military uniform. The shop is run by an elderly couple. And that affects me more than anything else. While you’re drinking their crappy macchiato, you can see the two of them: the old man likes to lie down in the hammock with a book, and the woman likes to tend her small garden. Sometimes you see the old couple argue a little bit; sometimes they sing along to some old Thai song playing on the radio together. I don’t understand a word of the song, but the way they sing is like they’ve rehearsed it a thousand times.

And I imagine that would be my 60s. I might sit down and see a glamorous view from the top of a hill every morning I wake up. I might sing my songs together with her, and I would look at the photo of our children with pride at the men they’ve become. I’d pick up a book, and my wife would shout at me because it’s the hundredth time she’s told me to take the trash out. She would let me taste the new menu she’s been trying, or we’d do a baking project. Every year we would travel, and I’d take her to see the world. Show her the roads I walked through. Show her historic places and tell her the insignificance of those places in human history: Berlin Wall, Vienna, the Great Wall, Stonehenge. And she would say she was married to an encyclopedia for 30 years and laugh.

And that’s what our life is going to be. That’s what I got from that coffee shop. I was always suicidal before that coffee shop—drugs, reckless driving. I looked for the high, pushed my limits very close to death. I thought every overdose, car crash, or stroke without dying would be my triumph against the universe. But that coffee shop is what made me change my behaviors, unhealthy habits, even wearing a seat belt.

I have that sense, knowing how fucked up this world has been, the chaos of nature, and still wanting to see what’s ahead for a while. Even though I ran from it, pretending all is well. Camus’s writings became my lullaby, The Myth of Sisyphus on repeat when I sleep, to keep telling myself it would found a world.

What I knew about that deep, dark, motherfucking shadow called life was that it was going to be me pushing my limits, tangling with death, abusing my body while figuring out finances. And then another battle would come: I would fight against death itself. But my wife’s diagnosis put me into a totally different scene in the future—how much I would be lost, how fucked-up a jerk I would become, happily lonely, sadistic, and suicidal.

What pisses me off is that this shitty world wouldn’t let me have a happy, absurd, normal life for a while. It strikes me with that, and it’s killing me. If Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence—to live this shit over and over again—is true, I would make the loop shorter and shorter.

That’s when I see what Charles Bukowski’s pain was, what Van Gogh was trying to say, and why Kurt Cobain put a bullet in his brain. And then I whispered:

“We don’t even ask happiness, just a little less pain.”