Day 7284 | Day 7518 | Day 7562
"You don't really believe in the future, do you Red?" I broke my gaze through the window and looked over to her on the other side of the room. She was sitting on her bed holding one knee under her chin while her other leg sprawled across the covers, toes playing with the blankets. Loose strands of auburn hair framed her face and gave life to the light captured from the florescents. The position drew her white capris taut over her thighs and buttocks and emphasized the curves of her calves--dancer's legs. More than once I'd watched as she put them behind her head with practiced motions and...
Eye contact Red, remember how to do eye contact?
I picked my words carefully. "I believe in the future for other people, I just don't really think there's a future for myself." She grinned at me in the way that made her look like Audrey Hepburn. My heart spasmed and I grinned back to cover my loss for words.
"Come on, you can't really be that pessimistic." I grinned again, this time to veil a grimace. Lately I'd been relying on sardonic understatement so much that my rare moments of brazen honesty weren't recognized for what they were.
I thought for another few moments, self-censoring what I was about to say so as not to let out too much self-hate or hint too heavily at deeper issues. "I just don't really want to do anything. I mean, we're going to college for what? So we can work nine till five for 50 years, then retire? It doesn't seem worth it to me." I was careful not to go too far into the rhetoric--people tend to take issue with my refusing to accept life as having self-evident value and resent my ignoring taboo by applying cost-benefit analysis to continued living.
"There's more things to life than work, Red. You find something you enjoy and then you work so you can do whatever that is." I suppressed a verbal barb. More to life than work; this coming from a chronic overachiever. One who saw no internship as too exclusive, no class unworthy of effort, and having no free time as a virtue.
She crossed her legs underneath her on the bed, then uncrossed them to lunge sideways and grab a book off the desk as I replied, "I hate meeting new people, I hate travel, and I hate social activities of all kinds. That pretty much knocks out most of the things people claim makes life enjoyable." Employment is a means to the end of enjoying life, however it is that you decide to do that. I'm drowning in Romanticism here. I don't give a shit about the 'richness' of experiencing all life has to offer, I'm not driven by doing new things. If I were to die having never traveled more than 100 miles from my birthplace, I'd say that was a life well lived. "And frankly, the idea that the release of more video games is all I have to live for is more than a little depressing." On a simple cost/benefit basis, the anxieties of life far outweigh the minimal enjoyment I receive from it.
I want out.