givemepeace
I wrote something. Call it fiction if you want. Some of it might be. Who knows. I don't.
"How're you doing?"
"Could be better."
The man stepped inside the building without a further word. A neighbour, I suppose, but I did not know him. He was visibly flustered by this sudden bout of honesty.
It left me sitting there, in front of the building, finishing stub of my cigarette, pondering this sudden wave of honesty.
It hadn't been the best night for me, that is of no doubt. I had gone to the gas station across the street to buy cigarettes to rectify this small problem.
I had cried, for the first time in years.
It's not enough to say that my behavior was simply honest. I tended to be honest whenever I could. People often shied from my brutal honesty, preferring rather to hear what they thought best about themselves. But this was me. I was being honest about myself.
I haven't done that in a long time.
Perhaps the only mitigating factor in all of humanity is the desire for change. For unpredictability, for something truly new. I have none of that.
I will be honest now and say that my life has truly changed, despite what I might tell my therapists, my friends, my confidants. My situations have changed. People look upon me and believe that I've lived a life of middle-class luxury.
Not the case. No one, not even my younger brother, realizes the inexorbitant amount of effort I have gone through the mend a collapsing family. Years spent apart. Things left unsaid.
Yet, that isn't what troubles my dreams when I sleep.
I suffer from what some might call prescience and ultimately... relentless logical intelligence. I am, unfortunately, constantly aware of what will precipiate from my actions.
And I can do nothing to change them.
That is, perhaps, why I've neglected to act upon anything. There is no drive to do anything whatsoever when ones future is already written. I have approached cusps, where it feels as though I can break through to the unknowable, the realm by which I can choose my own destiny, but every time I shy away and wallow in the directionless hole I have dug myself into.
Directionless. My standings in school have plummeted since I've lost all interest. I learn more in the span of an hour nestled with book and a cigarette than I could hope to glean from a classroom, but that isn't really the issue. It's that I simply... do not care.
I want a world in which I can choose my destiny. Where each and every action is simply unpredictable.
I fear it too. While my life in this self-fulfilling hole is mind-numbingly boring, it's stability. Human beings by nature fear instability.
I suppose that's why I've spent most of my life, where I've not just simply tried my best to destroy myself to escape from it all, in the assistance of others. I have a need for there to be change dictated in some way by myself, however small. Some sort of effect not governed by my fate.
And because I love them.
Nothing changes. The essential core of what I know to be simply doesn't change. Shit still happens when I know they will.
I don't see a point to self-motivation, to improve my... so called future... when I'll simply be living the same old existence. Even collapsing in a gutter somewhere would be some sort of change for me. Expected, certainly, but it will still be a sort of change.
I practice a mean form of escapism. My mind is not so relentless in its logical faculties when I engage in extreme acts of self-destruction. Drinking oneself to oblivion often does the trick, however temporarily.
And its in these moments when things start getting interesting. Things become unpredictable. I might find out only about consequences weeks, months later.
But I cannot maintain a life of constant inebriation. The effect simply upon the memory makes it less a sort of living than dying for a while.
So many religions, so much of human effort has been devoted to the mastery of ones future. I want that, in a way that contradicts that same statement. I don't want to know everything that's going to happen. I want to be able to make choices and see things change as they go along.
And so yes, I cried today. A brief moment, two seconds in which I allowed myself to reflect that my life has sunk into an utter pit. I might say that I'm too smart for my own self. I just don't want to have a destiny laid out before me. I've been avoiding it since I realized it was there.
My friend told me that the world needed my gift. My curse. It sounds like a bloody corny super-hero movie, I know. But I don't want it. I've lifted responsibility off my own shoulders where I could. I held a dying man in my arms once. Once was enough. I don't want that kind of dominion over the lives of others, for better or for worse. I want my own life. Something I can control, something that's not simply laid out before me.
I want to live life! Take chances! I want every moment of my life to be something new, something I can savour. Is that so much to ask?