Check-in

I’m tired and I’m tearing up and if I glance away from this screen for but a moment, let this flow of letters and words stop for but a second, my reality will disperse into a pixelated mess. I will experience some long-drawn, flowing, turquoise derivative of death, and it will kill some part of me that I am not aware of, that I will not miss.

How does it feel to regress by a year? To de-age? To feel yourself devolving, your impulses growing erratic, hungry, manic? Fatigue and ache drive my existence as of now, and this is the closest thing to ‘higher thought’ that I’ve experienced in some time.

I miss Infinite Jest. I miss that time. Oh, how I felt the time pass, how every moment was at my disposal, to choose to walk through the door, open the book, or to make tea. I am being dragged along like a fucking corpse right now. I miss those words. I miss Mario and Hal and Pemulis and Don Gately and Remy Marathe. My time with them is done, sealed between those two covers of that three-inch book, for I shall never traverse that distance the same way, see it all. I miss reading for hours and hours and having done that of my own choice. I miss that sense that I was a human being who could make with each moment what he wished, and saw what was before him, vast whatever and this and that, and made sense of it, deciding where to place his foot on his next step. I don’t know where to go.

I feel like a lie when I tell my advisor the last book I read for pleasure was Infinite Jest, like I fucking read anymore, like I’ve read anything since then. There’s a hole in my soul, and I’ve been filling it back up with white noise and static that kills me, makes me tired. Drift, drift, drift I do along this sea of grey screams as the wind howls burrowing into my ear, and the sky is cloudy and dark, and I have no oars, and there’s a weight below my eyes. I have become what I loathe and pity. I have become like any other person, myself one year past. I was running away. I don’t know what happened. I wake up and go to class and leave class and check my phone and eat dinner and play sports and check my phone and go to sleep. And the pain of seeing yourself become so, the pain of watching yourself fucking exist, exist in such a sad, pathetic way, looking through the eyes that stare blankly, thinking with the brain that is made of noise—the pain is unbearable, knowing that you really don’t have any control over this whole thing, that somehow you are not who you are, and instead are this other thing, a dead thing, dead. Dead.

And I don’t know whether it was this or that, some sludge of the soul or some psychic blow. There’s a warm star way off in the distance, in the night sky, that I cannot see for I am indoors. I see it though. It’s there. I’m going there soon. But for now I sit at my desk and write and think about how I’m going to put it all back together, how to see to it that I won’t turn twenty with a hole in my chest, that I won’t die having never written a book, that I won’t pass the years walking coolly and slowly and never stopping in any shop or home only to waste away my days in loneliness and isolation, for I was too strange or talented or spiteful or brash or sad or quiet. Every word I leave on the table will never be picked up. There is nothing else here. There is no one else to do it. This is not a call to action, but instead a calm assessment of the state of things. Like a long cloud across a verdant plane. I make out patterns in the clouds, and I feel the coolness of each blade of grass, brushing across my fingertips. I am collapsing before your eyes.