Mortality is an fascinating thing. It's not something I normally think about because, frankly, I think I'm going to live until I don't live anymore and whatever happens after that I'll deal with as it comes. However, as they seem want to do, birthdays happen every year, and every year, I'm again faced with another year gone and a new one coming and the march forward. 
I've always disliked birthdays. There have only been a handful in my adult life that have been enjoyable in any sense of the word and, despite my best efforts to the contrary, this one does not look to be one of them. Forget the fact that I just moved and know few, if any, people I would actually want to spend my birthday with; forget the fact that I was just dumped because she "didn't want to try anymore"; forget the fact that the actual interests in passing time in life I have are so specifically few and especially things I do by myself. I guess I won't be forgetting those things. 
No, the actual thought-provoking and feeling-engendering and soul-crushing realization that comes with this birthday is that I'm more than likely exactly half way through, time-wise, life. Actual death is such an obscure, unknown and unknowable realm that even considering the possibilities can make you go mad, the first thought of a blank nothingness abyss so blank and nothing that even the thought of nothing doesn't exist is such a strongly revolting ideal that if you can even brush against fathoming it that part of living ingrained into your DNA that makes you want to live reels in horror at the simple consideration. 
Having been someone whom at one period in time thought that maybe ending life was the only answer to "solving" the dread of lonliness and misery life entails which he felt himself trapped into, I've had enough time and enough revulsion of life itself to be able to sneak a peak up against that most elusive of subjects. Of course, I didn't learn anything about its nature, if I had I would be rich as fuck creating some religion or something. And, I have to say, the some times that nothingness of nothingness can be rather appealing.
But maybe that's a story for another day. 
No, mortality isn't so scary, not for one who has thought for a time that it was the answer to a question; because really it shouldn't be something that is feared, necessarily, because it's not something that is faced daily. In fact if your subconscious is doing its job then it's keeping you away from situations where you might face it. No, being only adjacently aware of it is all of the worry that one should put into it for any given amount of time.
Like on or around birthdays.