Long time ago. Vivid image. Working at a gas station, shitty part-time high school job. Get there, park somewhere away from the drug dealer who show up later. Clean out the garage, empty the oil cans, try not to get any weird shit on me. Boss leaves for the night, watch the pumps, clean the office. Gets late, cars stop coming, close up. Monday-Wednesday-Friday-Saturday Morning or Tuesday-Thursday-Saturday Afternoon.
Things got weird when it got late. Strange little corner of town, but it was mostly just quiet. 7 bucks an hour to stare at a window and consider my thoughts, which were mostly about how I’d love to be fucking anywhere else.
I think I was finishing up cleaning the office. Bossman was gone for the night, and I had a few hours of mindless boredom left.
Thinking about how my life was just this empty, passionless routine. So much of my time was tied up in just needing to be somewhere because it’s the law or my parents said so. School was a waste of time, teachers taught to the pace of the slowest and for every 10 minutes it might have been worth my time to listen the other 40 were a complete waste, so I generally didn’t bother to listen at all. The money from my job was nice, I guess, but I was making way more than I was spending because half of my free time was being spent in that hellhole. I only had the job because my parents insisted, “life experience.”
I was busy, but it was this utterly empty filling-time busy. I was going around in circles propelled purely by my own momentum.
I hated it, but I didn’t hate it enough to change anything. My hatred was this little seed of instability, this little wobble in my orbit. I wasn’t ready to break free, but it was building.
The problem, as always, wasn’t that it would be difficult to break free.
Here we sit on our little rock, going round and round the sun with a bunch of other little pieces of something out in the big dark. All of it spinning, slowly, some way or other. Things drift together or apart, their orbits stabilizing or decaying, until they find a pull they can’t escape from.
So imagine me, little rock, in it’s little empty orbit. Wobbling here and there, each time the routine of the day, or week, or month, hits it’s low point -
What else is out there? Where could I go?
They say life is full of possibilities, and it’s true. They say the world is a big place full of mystery and excitement and wonder, and it’s true.
There are colors, shapes, tastes, sights, and smells. There is an unrelenting variety of differences. People with different voices, with different kinds of lives or ways of living.
But that isn’t what I need. I hesitate, between the use of “I” or some greater collective pronoun - “we”, “some people”, “every lost soul rotting under a veneer of false contentment.” But I won’t generalize, because I’m not sure, although I think I’ve seen it every time I’ve looked deep enough into another person’s eyes.
Sensation is satisfying, for an animal. Novelty is entertaining, for an animal. And people are animals, no mistaking that.
But to be a thinking thing, to live not just because you found yourself alive, to act not only to defend and prolong that life…
You know what I’m saying, I hope. To live for. To believe in things bigger than just the life of the individual.
In short, the search for meaning. What the fuck is it, where do I get it, and what am I supposed to do with it once I find it?
…
The world’s a big crazy place, but so little of it means anything. It can be beautiful in a way that’s uplifting. But that beauty is remote. It doesn’t need me. It just is, and one day when I was way too young to be exposed to such things I had the queer thought that all of it was beauty, every little piece. That I could change it and shape it, but I wouldn’t improve it. The change would be arbitrary, the beauty just a different permutation of the same thing.
I was in a forest at the time, barefoot, my feet covered in detritus. There were trees standing and trees fallen, rotting. There were deer, always stumbling past if you’d wait long enough for them. And there were their bones. And it was all beautiful, and any change I made would just be the same thing.
For a while I used that. My version of beauty was forests, and nature. Cities were ugly, people lacked the simple innocence of animals, and I was going to stop them from destroying beauty.
I know better now. People are frustrating, but they’re beautiful too, even when they’re being ugly. Cities are actually kind of amazing, even though they seem crude now. I had the good fortune to hear from some people deep in the science of understanding and building cities, and I really want to see what they become. We’re nature changing itself, and we’re having a hard time because we’re struggling to understand ourselves, but if you look closely you can see the signs and the beauty we’re capable of creating.
The work that I do is sort of a contribution to that, in some tiny piece. Same problem, though - just another permutation of something I already think is beautiful.
I feel like parents should be coached about the dangers of existential crises in children. Who cares about drugs, keep them kids away from philosophers. I wonder sometimes if I’d be a happier, better adjusted person if I didn’t think about things like this, if instead of worrying about the nature of reality and my place in it I was thinking about where to get alcohol and drugs and fucking my class mates like everyone else.
…
Well. I did get out of my home town, and the shitty little gas station job a month or so after that little epiphany. I know a lot of people who took a lot longer and paid for it, so I guess there’s that.
I find myself drifting again, though.
It won’t be that much longer until I’m out of here, until I’m on to the next phase of whatever I’m doing with my life.
It’s lonely out here, in the deep dark sky, orbiting increasingly more distant stars. It’s been forever since anything really pulled at me, and…
I don’t want to turn into my father. Jumping from job to job, new place to new place, never satisfied. I was lucky they stuck around long enough for me to finish high school in the same place, which had a lot to do with how badly the previous move had fucked me up. Currently my dinky little apartment has been in the family longer than their house. And he’s pissed off with his boss and wants to go somewhere else again.
Just running, over and over, because sometimes the only time you can relax is in the car between wherever you’re coming from and wherever you’re going.
I need to find something worth looking for, worth finding. I need answers for a question I don’t know how to phrase, but that I can feel in my bones.
Love is the lie I tell myself when I’m at the end of my rope, but who even knows what love is anymore? I don’t even imagine happy endings anymore. Even if I found someone I cared about, who cared about me - two people can’t just live for the other. It’s a closed circle, that snake that eats itself.
I just imagine fighting that never ends, and maybe it means something that that’s my most comforting dream - someone who’ll bleed through all shit with me and still ends up sticking around.
…
One day I’m going to break out of my little orbit, say farewell to whatever star was anchoring me for the moment, and find myself lost in black. One day I’m going to run and there won’t be anywhere new to run to, and I’m going to drown in it.
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