Every night the last week - I’m not going to write tonight, I’m going to take a break. I’m going to focus on other things, I’m going to do something other than scrutinize the interior of my skull.
But I still find myself staring up at the night sky instead of at the book I was trying to read, thinking.
So, fuck it. Something’s going on, and I’m going to let it burn itself out.
I’ve always hated the idea of self-denial, anyway.
…
I don’t know why now. Maybe because the end’s in sight, or just because last summer/fall was a living hell.
I had a good rhythm going. Better than I’d been since moving out here. Finally settling into it.
Fuck, that was probably enough all by itself.
So here I sit in front of a computer screen, remembering the past and all the little moments that shaped me. Picking apart every decision, assessing my structural integrity with a sledgehammer.
With all the bitching and moaning, you’d think my life was a smoking ruin. That I was miserable, that I was stuck in a rut going nowhere.
I’m financially independent. I’ve passed all the qualifying exams for my PhD, and I’m on track for finishing it and getting out of this shithole in this next year and a half. I’ve spent my summers for the last couple years hanging out with some of the big names in my field and some really cool people from outside doing things I never would have thought of. I’m dripping with interesting questions and, increasingly, the expertise to start answering them. In the past few years I’ve struggled for and ultimately found confidence in my work. I’ve earned a place at the table of scientific discourse, and there’s a ton more to do ahead of me.
And it’s all so fucking boring.
I mean, it’s not, intellectually. It’s all very complex and involved, especially the parts where I’m actually studying complexity.
But there’s no drama. There’s no romance.
My life is written in the detailed, monotonous style of a scientific article. A great many things happen, they’re relevant in the documented ways, and represent an incremental advance in human understanding of something that utterly lacks any kind of poetry or a human soul.
Every person I talk to, the conversations are the same. Did you read this article? This is very interesting. Oh, we should talk about that later, publish a paper.
…
I’m not unhappy. I chose this, this is what I wanted. I’ve struggled to get it, and I’m proud of myself for what I’ve gotten.
And I stay up late tearing up the comfortable furniture of my carefully-crafted life because I’m staring down the barrel of the foreseeable future and there is no fucking way that this is it, that this is enough.
I made good, responsible decisions to get here. There’s chances I missed, opportunities I wasted, but overall I’m not really built for heavy-duty regret. They were my decisions, and that’s the victory that really matters.
But fuck it, if I didn’t wish I’d made a mistake. If there wasn’t some huge thing that I’d missed, if there wasn’t some crucial detail I’d overlooked which could change my life.
At this point, I don’t really give a shit about good anymore. I just want different. I want new.
I just want fucking more than this.
The drinking thing is interesting, but really it’s a small shift that’s been happening for a long time, just something that I haven’t really spent much time looking at directly. I already stopped discarding people just based on their preferences for recreation, the last time I had occasion to hang out with some new people I thought might be cool I went out and got a beer with them. I stopped judging my friends for drug use years ago, and have had a number of good conversations talking to them about it. It was an old prejudice that was pretty shitty, but it’s one I outgrew a while ago without really noticing. It’s not some profound realization that’s going to change my life.
It’s the same fucking thing I went through with my ex. Yeah, I fucking hate you because you cheated on me and it wasn’t even fucking about me, our grand tragic romance was really just you faking it because you were looking for an abusive asshole and, surprise, I wasn’t one after all. But, you know what? Let’s try it again, just to see how it feels?
It felt nice to remember, for a minute, but let’s be honest. I couldn’t keep it up inside her, and I was so disgusted with myself she had to guilt me into cuddling with her after I jerk off on her stomach. All the old motions were there, but they were hollow and everything that mattered was gone.
…
All these things I’ve done, I’ve felt, they meant something once, in their time and place.
I’m looking in the wrong place, because the past is just a corpse rotting in the ground.
What I need is somewhere else.
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