Mindless pursuit of nothing.

Life for me is vices. You choose a few and you stick with them. You hope against hope that they will be enough to convince you to see the sunrise of tomorrow. It has to be enough, it must be. There is nothing else between these walls to have. There is no bright future to imagine, because no matter where I am, alone or not, I will never be pleased. I can smile, I can laugh, but the second I think beyond that moment…it all dies.

I acknowledge that this place is my own. I gave up my chance to get away. I could have finished college and gotten a degree that I hated so that I could make enough money to move the fuck away. I can still do that now, if I arrange it all carefully, but what does it matter? What do I plan to do? I will have my own house on some deserted lot and live my misery on the fringe of everything, as I have always done. It will be no different. Alone, surrounded…it’s all the same. I can’t get away from myself. All I can do is pick at the threads and try to pull myself apart more quickly.  

I want so badly for it to mean something, all of this. Not purpose—I will not search for that—it doesn’t exist. All I want is to wake without regretting it. I want to know that even if I am doing the most mundane of things, it is alright. I want to believe that it is not nonsensical suffering, that there is something here for me that will make it less terrible. I wouldn’t expect good. Hell, I wouldn’t even expect decent. I know it would always be horrible, that the pain would always far outweigh anything pleasant. But I want some fucking ‘pleasant’. Where is it?

I’m beginning to suspect I’ve become numbed to it, any feelings of satisfaction or pleasure. I am the most jaded thing. I find something and I drain it until there is nothing left, until it can’t even bring a hint of relief. What is there after those things have been burned away? Do I find something new, pursue something else? Repeat this, over and over every time something grows tiresome?  

Everything has no taste. Bland and fucking dry. I feel like all I have been doing all these years is force-feeding myself justification—reasons to live—in this endless cycle of unstoppable gluttony. I’ve gotten lazy and complacent about it, not bothering to change things up, to explore beyond what is familiar and known to me. Now it’s too late. I can’t taste it anymore; it’s sand on my tongue and means nothing. It doesn’t make any difference now that I need it to survive. I’d still obstinately push the plate away even with that knowledge, because I simply do not wish to tolerate the tastelessness and grit any longer.

The feelings have not passed still. It’s been too long. They’re dogging my footsteps now, waiting, those demons fucking lurking around the corners to come extract their pound of flesh. Come and get it I say. Come take it if you dare. I don’t want it. I’ll take my apathy back over this any day. I’ll take nothing over sorrow. I’ll take numb. At least then I can distance myself from this, see it clearly without the taint of a bitter, unneeded heart.

Put me back in my coma.

Alone.

I wanted nothing more than to have some peace for a few hours. My mom goes on and on about things, and I tire of listening. She doesn’t seem to get that even mentioning a future makes me tense, makes my hands sweat and skin prickle. It’s almost torturous to talk about such things, so…I don’t.

I decided early on that I was going to go out. I could feel the heat trying to penetrate through the windows and black curtains, but the light of it, those rays, was somehow dark. That means a cloudy day. There are some days where I don’t even look out the window or step outside. I wait until night, sometimes never knowing if it was sunny and sweltering, or one of those days where it was black and grey and beautifully bleak. They all blend together, into oblivion. But I can look at the light that manages to filter in and get an idea, if I choose to. I can even walk outside tell you the time by staring at the sun’s position in the sky, the way its beams falls over the house, the shadows it creates from the surrounding trees.

I wanted to go alone, but nearly didn’t get to. Thankfully, my quad decided to be the homicidal bitch it prides itself in being, and stubbornly choked on its gasoline before dying out and blatantly refusing to start. The fuel filter is clogged with something, probably, and it didn’t help that it ended up flooded from all the times we tried to kick start it unsuccessfully. My dad finally decided he wasn’t going to be able to go, and told me to take his quad. I was strangely relieved. There is something so freeing about not having to constantly watch out for another person when you are blindly flying down whatever trail you happen to come across. And shouting over the roar of engines makes one’s throat hoarse anyway. Not that it matters. I just wanted to go as fast as possible without having someone to tell me not to or to holding me up while they gaze at an utterly useless map. I always go by memory.

I think I wanted to run away for awhile. I feel trapped indoors. All there is here is food and computer screens and exercise equipment. 

I went down this trail I’ve never been on before. It travelled alongside the railroad, with trees on either side. It should have been the same as any other path, but I saw this one view that made me stop, though it meant breathing in the cloud of dust and engine exhaust. 

You can’t quite see it in this one. But it was much darker than the picture makes it seem, and right at the center of the path, where it fades off, there was this almost white patch of light. It made me think, “light at the end of the tunnel”.

That trail went on forever. I almost ended up on the highway. There were abandoned couches everywhere, and even a refrigerator, among other things. Then little flecks of broken glass that reflected in the sun. Bits of garbage all over. I don’t know why, but there is something about being alone that makes me stop and take in and examine what I need to, perhaps because I don’t have to take the time to explain myself to someone else.

I can look through the garbage of civilization, baby toys and wrecked cars spattered with neon paint from paintballs, old mattresses, and clothes, and find more of an explanation of the world from those things than any other. Like I know that if I find baby food and balled-up diapers, used condoms will also be there, and beer, and prescriptions. They go hand in hand, apparently. This is what these people are: this is their garbage. These are their secrets dumped in the middle of the woods where they think no one will ever see them. But I do see. I always see.

I don’t know what I am getting at; perhaps nothing. I just know that the more time I spend thinking, the more I am displeased with all that I see. Sometimes the fact that nothing is perfect is so astoundingly beautiful. Other times, I find myself reflecting, that it is nothing but ugly.

You have to love contrast.

Annoyed. Hopeless.

I’m not in a very pleasant mood. I think I’m just tiring of doing the same old shit all of the time with no way of escape. No one will hire me (and believe me, I’ve applied everywhere), so here I am at home, day after fucking day, doing absolutely nothing. That, and hey, I do have a driver’s license, but I’m not allowed to use it. I feel like everything I’ve tried to do means nothing. It’s all in vain. This is all just a mistake, living is a mistake. All I do is buy useless shit I don’t need, and sit at this computer typing when I don’t even want this.

It’s not a matter of feeling sorry for myself, it’s a matter of realizing there is no reason to be here. I am trapped—chained—to my parents and whatever befalls them. I can’t get away. I could run, sure, but to where? And not to mention, I would have nothing. I have all the comforts in the world here, but the unhappiness wells up so strongly at times that it feels suffocating. This is supposed to be what everyone wants. Being comfortable as well as you can be, all from years of throwing money into the system and accumulating everything you could possibly need. But I don’t need the things half so much as I am starving for just a taste of independence. Of getting the hell away from humanity, away from all the things that pull them down, all the things that are pulling me down because I’ve let this place poison me.

I’m dying slowly. Maybe I do deserve it.

Missing.

Usually I try to ensure that even if it’s the dead of winter, I get outside. I tend to go stir crazy being indoors all of the time, trapped in a square with nothing but the same stimulus over and over again. Just a blasting television, a stereo playing something, a small heater running, and about ten projects splayed out in various places. My desk is such a wreck that I’ve given up on finding anything. I throw my scraps of notes all over it, then snatch at them later when I need them for reference. I tried keeping a journal full of them, but eventually, that too got lost, under the pile of doodles, all the sewing machine paraphernalia (one of the ‘projects’), and all the random paint tubes that get scattered around by my cat.

He just leaps on top of it all, fairly unconcerned with whether or not he is thoroughly destroying everything. He’s cleared a spot by my computer by shoving everything out of the way. He sits there staring, literally for hours on end. Looking at me. I feel like I’ve said this before. The cat doesn’t even lie down, just sits there uncomfortably. Every time I look over (which is usually unintentional, as I’m searching for something), he meows. He’ll then wait for me to make eye contact, and if I do, he continues to meow like we’re having a conversation. My mother keeps asking me if I’m talking to someone. Yeah. I’m talking to the fucking cat sitting on my desk, watching me.

But I’ve been sleeping so much, today I finally got fed up with myself, got dressed, and finally went for a walk after about a month-long absence. I think it was driving me crazy, being inside. Feeling trapped, caged, with the same people day after day. There’s a worn trail on my carpet right in front of my television where I pace like something gone mad. Hours. Pace, pace. That habit hasn’t stopped, no matter how much I’ve tried to work on it over the years. It keeps getting worse. But it helps calm me down. My mind goes and goes and goes, never stopping. I can’t find solace, I can’t find rest, so I wear my body out in an attempt to shut my head down. I’ve taken to using allergy medication to get myself to sleep lately, because I’m sleeping so much my body doesn’t want sleep. 14 hours is too much, for anyone. I’m trying to sleep it all away, I think. I’m hoping that each time I wake up it will be a different reality, a different mood.

There’s days when I wake up and do feel different. Maybe I went to bed hopeless and I wake up feeling…alright. Not so much a mess. More clarity. I’ve also discovered that I can go without sleep, something I’ve been toying with. My thoughts turn off a little when I’m extremely tired, something I dread, and something that I never thought I would try to do intentionally. But now, I want them off, I want nothingness sometimes, because I’ve gotten used to it. I’m getting addicted to numb. It’s so much easier when there is nothing to think about. None of it matters at those times, and that is both something to enjoy and something to loathe. Sometimes it is beautiful to look at what you treasure and for it to suddenly mean absolutely nothing.

But the woods were missing. I missed them. It was 16 degrees and windy, but I felt a lot better after disappearing for a long while. I keep forgetting I’m not just something automated, that I am something alive. I have to be out in the cold, dry air and feel it sometimes. I can’t just go by memory, as much as I want to. I have to have those short little glimpses of something not this, something not so rigidly controlled, or I start to go mad. I forget it’s there, then all I see is gloom.

Sometimes I forget I’m alive.

It seems as though this life never stops. It goes and goes, and I seem to be just drifting along, half-conscious and all numb. It has been too long already. I can’t help but wonder how anyone willingly lives passed 20. There was too much here to begin with; I want no more of this place, this existence.

I want to be my own person—I want to separate from this weak pathetic thing that is so inextricably attached to me. This person, I want her dead. I want to forget all of the things that go through her mind and settle in this darkness, oblivious to everything but myself, to this…painless suffering. That is what it is too, painless…so numb it doesn’t hurt, yet somewhere, somehow, I know it should….

I am lost in the bleakness, lost in the spaces between the hours that mean nothing. It stretches on and on, too damn fucking much, too damn fucking long. I write and write, with nothing else, no other meaning. I don’t care, only frown, wondering why I am not angry, why I do not fight my own degeneration into nothingness….

I don’t want help. What I want is for no one to care. I want my parents to give up on me so that I can just fade into the darkness and die away without feeling as though I am more of a waste than I already am. Half the time I don’t even care what they think, which is the saddest part. I should, yet sometimes I can’t.

I just want an end, I want it to be laid out in front of me and given so that it can just be done, so that there will be no disputing. I want all of those brief seconds where I think that things could be okay to abandon me so that I can make the choice, my last one. My final one.