untitled
Lei tells me to trust my guts. It’s strange, though. Can’t explain it in quite the right way. I’ve tried writing it into some journal a few times but that notebook is lost somewhere in the dumpster, probably when I was cleaning the flat and got too lazy to actually look through the boxes I had laying around.
It’s been a while. I’ve long since abandoned my futile efforts to come to terms with this strangely unshakeable feeling. For some time I thought it was normal. Maybe it is. But I look around and nobody seems as stressed as I feel--or as haunted, I should say.
Haunted? That’s where it gets a little hazy. Haunted isn’t the right word. Haunted makes people think of those movies, translucent figures of death resembling past lives, bobbing around us “mortals,” trying to fulfill some sort of destiny, exact some revenge, pass on some desperate message. That’s not how it is. I think. I mean, people have tried to prove those kinds of haunts exist. It’s silly. Once you’re dead, you’re free from all responsibility. Why would you come back anyway? Who even cares after that?
It’s this--I don’t know. I just feel like I’m haunted by something--or the absence of it. Like there’s this metaphorical cavity cutting through organs and bones and veins and I walk, every day, feeling the air swish around in it, stagnating and bouncing off the architecture of the hole to make eerie little whistles between the cracks. Like if I put my hand into my mouth and dig deep enough I might be able to feel the walls of the cavity, feel the pulsating flesh inside of me, the hot air moving between my fingers. And my hand will come out clean because there’s no blood there. No me. It’s an absence. It’ll be just like putting my hand in a sterile, empty box.
I mean, it’s fine. I function normally. There’s nothing entirely abnormal about this feeling--it’s just this strange conviction I’ve grown accustomed to. That there’s something inherently missing about me, something integral to my life that I just haven’t gotten (yet? Don’t know if yet is the right word because it implies certain arrival in the future). I have a social life, friends, a job, education, all that. Just your standard disillusioned millennial swimming through the viscous bigot-filled snot pool of society. In sum, I’m doing alright.
And there it is. I’ll say I’m alright and momentarily it’ll occur to me that maybe I’m actually not alright. I’ve been living my life the wrong way. And that whole cascade of memories will come back to me and I won’t see my life as a line but a choose your own adventure path where I’m landed right in the middle, scoring a measly 66% because I didn’t make the right choice when Johnny asked me what pizza I wanted during his fifth grade birthday party twelve years ago. And god, that mistake I made when I told Sarah I didn’t need to room with her because I had my own place. Or the way I settled that argument with my now ex-girlfriend.