The other night, I noticed I was surrounded by remnants of projects started and abandoned. Colored pencils sharpened to a point yet untouched, cracked paint nestled in gorgeous palettes, yarn hanging off of bookshelves piled with books left unread. The drawers though closed, seemed to taunt me to fling them open and see the dust collected in layers in resin moulds once cherished.
The clock on my table went tick, tick, tick.
Its sound echoing in my head like a bomb counting down. We are all dying at the rate of one second per second and yet I can’t get up.
Can’t read.
Can’t paint.
Can’t think.
Can’t breathe.
When did my body get so heavy that I can’t will it to move, yet so tiny that I feel it fade to irrelevance?
The monotony of this existence has lulled me to a dreamless sleep, a stupor I’m trapped in. The dreariness of work kills my spirit from doing things I once enjoyed. The dread of returning to work kills my excitement to make meaning of the little time I have. The fear of irrelevance is crippling.
Sylvia Plath comes to mind –
“I felt like a racehorse in a world without racetracks or a champion college footballer suddenly confronted by Wall Street and a business suit, his days of glory shrunk to a little gold cup on his mantel with a date engraved on it like the date on a tombstone.”
I have always tried to be dutiful and play my roles well. Slipping from one expectation to another like changing clothes according to the weather.
A dutiful student, I studied, wrote, and read to reach goals predetermined. Like a game, I played to win the shiniest of things, collecting trophies like little trinkets that proved I deserved to breathe another day more easily.
Now, at the cusp of adulthood, I stand unsure of the role I intend to play. Intent – it’s such a funny word, elusive, do we intend to be born, do any of the things that lie inconsequentially between our first breath and our last? Or is it just a matter of consequence, circumstance? Did I ever intend to do any of the things that I am so fiercely proud of or did I just do it because I believed I HAD to?
Tick, tick, tick.
Sometimes Sundays are hard.
The slowness of the day forces me to face my thoughts, it feels like there are wires attached to my eyes making me look at my illusory existence.
Sometimes I wonder if these thoughts are even mine—or just fragments of things I’ve read, watched, or been told to believe.
When I feel myself, my identity and my existence dissolve and melt into a cesspool of nothingness, I look out the window through the black rails that line my view. The sky is sprayed with stars that softly twinkle and shine. The sound of silence is deafeningly sweet.
The whorl of galaxies and burning stars do not care for our little troubles.
My brother once told me that the saying “we are made of stardust” was not just a phrase but a fact. I thought it was just a romantic line that made us feel connected, like comforting lies we tell ourselves about perpetual existence.
We are made of the dying ashes of a burning star that crashed onto our planet with blazing glory. The universe - unintentionally, unfeelingly - created a way to experience itself. We are just tiny sensory cells littered in the beautiful embrace of a world we do not understand, and may never understand.
The whorl of galaxies and burning stars may not care for our little troubles. Yet, we are made of them.
Made of sparkling stardust and years of tumultuous change, just to be here and to breathe.
Maybe, the perfect life, the perfect existence, the peak of happiness that we race to seek is nothing but a shadow of a dream. Something to occupy our minds and our time so that the indifferent world doesn’t seem so indifferent anymore. We turn these goals into the meaning of existence - letting them grip our minds and squeeze the air from our lungs.
We are all just hurtling towards the same glorious end. And there are stories I want to live and paintings in my head that are bursting at the seams to be brought to life. A hundred books to read, things to learn and people to meet. There are innumerable things I want to do in this unbearably light existence that I live.
But for now, I’ll breathe.
