The Desire to See Something New

A serious creative writing piece; a trilogy of short essays

Pain

What does it mean to be human? I don’t feel human sometimes. 

What does it mean to be depressed? Is depression just sadness? Aren’t we always depressed? If we’re always depressed, what’s the point of living?

Why is dying considered a sad thing? If dying is bad, does that make living inherently good? What if I don’t feel very good? I don’t feel good at all. I spend most of my time barely awake. Awake enough to see the world moving around me. Not awake enough to feel anything. 

Am I even sad? What is sadness? Is it the absence of happiness? What is happiness? What’s going to make me happy? I don’t know if I want to be a doctor. I don’t think they get it. “When I think about your personality, that’s the only role I can see you in”, she says. “When you grow up, you’re going to have to take care of us as well. And your sister”. Oh. I don’t even know if I can take care of myself. I spend more time in the clouds than I do on the ground. I don’t have an appetite anymore. I haven’t touched a banana in years. I haven’t touched an apple in decades.

I think a lot about my future. I think and I think and I think and I think. But I can’t really do anything. I write stuff down when I think. But I never come back to it. Then I think back. I wish I had done that when I had the chance. Why didn’t I do that? Why didn’t I take that opportunity? Fear of missing out on something else? Fear of being busy? Fear of not being happy? You’re already not happy. I keep telling myself I want to live without regrets, but then I regret the things I didn’t do trying to not regret not doing something else. I am beginning to want to change. I spent too long in this stagnant state. My comeback will be legendary. At least, that’s what I keep telling myself. 

                                                                                                                                                                                              

Soldiers

Why do we desire to be at the top of the food chain so deeply? 

Why do we yearn for it? What drives us to condemn every other life form on this planet, gods playing with our own universes. 

We view everything as beneath us, even our own kind. Those of us who have light skin just got the jump on it before others could. 

The idea of using skin color as a reason to presume superiority is genuinely so interesting. Imagine if people with big noses were doing cool great things in the world. In response, dudes with little noses got really butthurt and banded together and decided to go on The Crusades. Yea… That’s my headcanon at least. 

So now, we are pushed one rung lower on the food chain. What do we do? We turn around and push more people down so it doesn’t happen to us again. Bodies crawling over bodies, all in a mad scramble to reach the top. 

But the top of what? We don’t even know where that top is. And what happens when we get to the top? We look down, and see the damage we’ve caused. And we tell our kids the stories, and we tell them to be better, but they learned from your actions, not from your mistakes. They know no better. 

We all think we want to change things, that we want to make a difference. But the world stays the same. You want to try to help people. But at the end of the day, you’re still looking down at them, just from a lower rung on the chain. 

                                                                                                                                                                                              

I love you

“If you were to become a Middle American farmer I’d beat up on every vegetable and harvest them around you,” Doja Cat. I’ve been thinking about you a lot recently. I feel like I haven’t seen you in a long time. I wonder where you’ve been. I just wanted to write and tell you I miss you. You have been there for me in all the times I needed you. You’ve always been unapologetically you around me. The things I’ve accomplished with you in my life, things that make me so proud. I miss times spent sitting with you, living inside the worlds of books and games. I always think about the movies we’ve seen, movies we cried to. I’m understood by you. Nobody sees the parts of you that I see. I’m crying as I write this thinking about you. You’ve seen me at my worst, and you were so happy for me at my best. I can’t imagine a life spent without you. Thank you for the times that we have had. Thank you for the times ahead of us. Thank you for this pride. Thank you for this life. It has been fun. I wouldn’t have done it any other way.