notes from above ground

xxiv

Everything feels forced. Waking up, eating, studying, eating, studying again. There’s no spontaneity. The joie de vivre is dead. All of this has been done before, again and again, for days on end, with no end in sight. Someone is dangling a carrot on a stick, and I’m stupidly following it down paths I otherwise would never have taken. The person dangling the carrot is the institution, and the carrot is power and money and prestige. And I’m the ass.

The path has gotten predictable. Boring. The carrot? Dry. Rotted. Each day is exactly like the one before, so it becomes difficult to imagine the days ahead as anything but more of the same. I don’t even want the carrot anymore, but the person dangling it will dig their spurs into me if I slow down.

I look at the path ahead and see nothing but scorched earth. I’m too far from home to know where I am, so I rely on the person dangling the carrot for directions. My life is in their hands, and I don’t trust them.

I’m sure my anticipation is flawed somehow, that the metaphor is self-indulgent, that the “scorched earth” thing is dramatic. But I’m addicted to the anticipation. It gives me the illusion that I’m living in the future. But the illusion never does me any good. No matter what, I’m still here in the present, where I’ll be forever. The anticipated future realities will never come, because the actual realities will have been impossible to accurately anticipate.

Last night as I was falling asleep, I saw a pair of eyes staring at me. They were connected by an infinity sign and glowed dark red. They carried a sense of foreboding, and they reminded me of my mortality. I was being watched from within. I realized that my consciousness, and the infinity eyes, will be with me forever, even in the wake of a catastrophic blow to my health. If my arms and legs are cut off, for example, I’ll still have my consciousness. If I go into a coma, I’ll still have my consciousness. Those infinity eyes… I’m not sure what their intentions are.

Maybe the eyes are telling me that I’m all alone on this path. It’s just me and my consciousness. There’s no one dangling the carrot on a string. I’m a unicorn with a big beautiful horn, and the carrot is tied to my horn, dangling in front of me as if suspended in air. I forget that the carrot is tied to my own appendage and can’t be caught no matter how fast I run. The carrot turns my horn into a source of misery rather than something to be cherished for its own sake. I forget it’s even there. All I see is carrot.

I’ve been checked out of my life for a while, checking back in every now and then to see if it’s over yet. What a waste. I tell myself that it’s okay to dissociate through it, because I’ll check back in when it really counts.

Maybe this is one of those cautionary tales where the protagonist thinks their life sucks and that it can only be fixed when they get this one thing, but then they get the thing and their life doesn’t change, or it gets worse, or they die right after they get the thing. Or worse: they die before they get the thing. I’m sure they’d feel really stupid then.

I’ve become terrified of dying. I can tell that I’m living wrong, but I keep going because it’ll get better when the weird year ends. But what happens if I die now and don’t get to see what it’s like on the other side of this year? The weird year could be my deathbed. It’s a possibility that puts a pit in my stomach.

It’s fall now. People are going back to school even though they’d rather not. At least we have solidarity in the misery. The passage of time is evident by the changing of the leaves, and the year can’t go on forever. Nature won’t allow it. Soon, the snow will fall again, and we’ll have come full circle.