xxv
prev.cont.Fourteen weeks left. I’d ask who’s counting, but we’re way past that. I’m obviously counting. I count every day.
I’m sure it won’t be that bad. There'll be some good times within those fourteen weeks (times seven equals 98 days). Each day has its own flavor, an experience to be had, whether it’s delicious, disgusting, or otherwise.
Today’s flavor was pissed-off. I was answering practice questions and getting angry at the implication that I should know the answers. Each time I got one wrong, it felt like a slap in the face. A personal attack.
It’s all too much. The practice questions, expectations, conversations, needing to know about the health of strangers. It takes a toll, which I sometimes forget—until I try to answer idiotic practice questions.
Take a breath. It’ll be okay. There are 98 days left, and I just checked one off. That’s no small feat. Checking days off is never as effortless as it sounds. It may sound easy when you’re hearing about it in this two-dimensional, grayscale world, but it's not, even when I’m phoning it in.
Psychosis would feel like a relief at this point. Or dementia. Something mind-altering. If I were to lose the ability to participate, I’d have no choice but to get out. A break from reality feels so tantalizing.
My day started with the old, charmingly effeminate neurologist asking himself, out loud, if he was “ready for this reality.” I knew exactly what he meant. I wonder how he’s gone so long without slipping away completely into his preferred reality outside of the above ground.
We tell ourselves that the best way out is always through. We put it on a postcard, put that postcard on a t-shirt, and sell it to the masses. We make the masses work their whole lives just to buy the t-shirt so they can wear it in front of their kids. We could get out a different way, but we don’t, because the t-shirt says that the best way out is through. Why would we go against that? It’s on a t-shirt!
I feel like the neurologist wants to wake up. Instead, he puts on the t-shirt every day and chooses “through.” And he’s pretty late into his career…. Retired, actually, isn't he? But he keeps coming back? We’re all doomed.
There’s nothing to be solved—just to be lived. Stop trying to figure it out. There’s nothing to figure out. This is just it. Things happen. Things will keep happening. That’s the way it is. Soon enough, my eyes will close and my arms will go limp, and I will escape into sleep. Not the underground, not the above ground, but somewhere else entirely.
exit