1996:
Choose Life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television, choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol, and dental insurance. Choose fixed interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisurewear and matching luggage. Choose a three-piece suite on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing, spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pishing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up brats you spawned to replace yourself.
Choose your future.
Choose life.
2017:
Choose life. Choose designer lingerie in the vain hope of kicking some life back into a dead relationship. Choose handbags, choose high-heeled shoes, cashmere and silk to make yourself feel what passes for happy.
Choose an iPhone made in China by a woman who jumped out of a window and stick it in the pocket of your jacket fresh from a South Asian firetrap.
Choose Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram and a thousand others ways to spew your bile across people you've never met. Choose updating your profile, tell the world what you had for breakfast and hope that someone, somewhere cares. Choose looking up old flames, desperate to believe that you don't look as bad as they do. Choose live-blogging, from your first wank till your last breath; human interaction reduced to nothing more than data.
Choose Ten Things You Never Knew About Celebrities Who've Had Surgery.
Choose screaming about abortion, choose rape jokes, slut-shaming, revenge porn and an endless tide of depressing misogyny.
Choose 9/11 never happened, and if it did, it was the Jews.
Choose a zero-hour contract and a two hour journey to work, and choose the same for your kids, only worse, and maybe tell yourself that it's better that they never happened. And then sit back and smother the pain with an unknown dose of an unknown drug made in somebody's fucking kitchen.
Choose unfulfilled promise and wishing you'd done it all differently.
Choose never learning from your own mistakes.
Choose watching history repeat itself.
Choose the slow reconciliation towards what you can get, rather than what you always hoped for. Settle for less and keep a brave face on it.
Choose disappointment and choose losing the ones you love, then as they fall from view, a piece of you dies with them until you can see that one day in the future, piece by piece they will be all gone and there will be nothing left of you to call alive or dead.
Choose your future, Veronica.
Choose life.
* This post was created in honour of Trainspotting 2 which came out in January 2017 *
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