The instinct

This is one of the times when I can write nothing but my story--when I could use my mother's computer in my mother's room, but I choose instead to take my laptop from the bedside table, pull at the tangled cables, and drag it across the room to my desk beside the window. Three thirty is not a bad time considering the sunlight won't be hitting the screen directly as it would have an hour earlier. It's a rare moment, a time I've been dreaming and planning for, when I finally convince myself that I would sit down and write--I've always sat, but I seldom write.

Where could the story of my life begin when it has all but hit a dead end? That I begin a story with no ending is absurd. I always work backwards: to get to a restaurant, to finalize my registration, to convince a friend that she should not have sex, yet. Those are simpler things, when enough energy keeps me going and distractions keep me scatterbrained. Unfortunately being empty is a state of mind I've become acquainted with quite recently. No school, no homework, no daily social situations to be fussy about. I could imagine the look in my eyes when people ask me a question and I'm too tired to answer. It is the reflection of a drifter, a homeless wanderer. Not stemmed in pride, nor in self-righteousness. A tint of shame, then seclusion.

If only human existence could be so removed from labor and sweat. If only it makes perfect sense to make this lifestyle the norm.

Nihilism was not what I was driving for when I took my first breath and decided that I should survive. That instinct, the sign of good health and resilience, was what saved me before I even knew my life was threatened. But instincts turn into inclinations, and inclinations into obsessions. After all the labor, the fighting, and the "chasing of the dreams," it seems as if that crucial decision I made as an infant turned out to be a fraud. It seems, as if, I am now as alienated from myself as I would be if I'd crashed my first course and given up trying when I was two.

Vanity, vanity. That I should have known before I took the first step. That just because I couldn't run doesn't mean I have to walk twice as fast as people who could. Take life a moment at a time, didn't they used to say? But then they told me I didn't have too many moments, and so I grabbed and lived a moment as if it were three. Lived life to the fullest! Except it wasn't mine.

So many things can be condensed into a single thought, and so many thoughts into silence.