My Whole Expanse I Cannot See…

I formulate infinity stored deep inside of me…

Aug 8

Waking up, wandering toward apocalypse, running out of time…

Category: Life,Random Thought

So, I woke up at 4:30 am totally scared. I don’t remember dreaming anything bad, I just woke up feeling like something bad was happening, or was ready to happen. After that, I couldn’t sleep again. I didn’t want to sleep again. I always immediately go to wake up my display (I never sleep my computer, just the display. I run the thing like a fucking server.), the day-bright LED is reassuring. The past few months I wake up and just read for at least three hours, sometimes longer. It’s calming to go wherever some book wants me to go, even a post-apocalyptic vampire world.

The idea of apocalypse is actually soothing to me. At the end of everything, tedious stress is out the window; schedules, money, Goddamn politics. All that matters is the stuff that really matters, being alive, being close to at least one person you love. Perhaps I’m taking a romantic view, but I honestly think that’s how it’ll generally go when the zombies come. There’ll be brutality, it’s not like sociopaths will snap out of it and become armed guards for nuns, but good people will remain good people, and will remain trying to find goodness in whatever nightmare is happening. This isn’t a just from fiction, the emotional connection we feel to scenes in fiction happens because those scenes are based in reality.

A writer doesn’t sit down and just make shit up, not everything, not the visceral emotions being evoked by their fiction. The words are different, but the ideas within the fiction that make us feel joy, fear, sorrow, love, are as old as language. There’s nothing new under the sun, fiction comes from things that actually happen. I once kissed Sara in a park, under a gazebo, just as a torrential, Tsunami-esque downpour started slamming onto the wood above. We’re making out, as mist and sideways rain is cast into our pocket-universe. It sounds like the fucking Notebook, or any John Cusack 80s movie, but it was real. Tom Hanks died for others in Saving Private Ryan, fiction, sure, but every single Hell-on-Earth war has countless documented acts of selflessness. There’s a reason “life imitates art” isn’t the way that phrase goes, it’s not true. Art imitates life, in some way, always.

No, I don’t think my post-apocalype is saccharine at all. I think that when the zombies come, the most valuable resource will be time, and people will stop wasting it on shit that doesn’t matter. At the end of everything, I love you will be one of the easiest, least terrifying things to say to another person, kind of the opposite of now. We blow through so much time just being afraid to say those three words, let alone a thousand other things.

The way we waste time scares me. I feel time, I feel the clicking wheels wearing me, everyone, everything away. I know it’s happening, I know that no matter what, we all run out of time, and a thing that scares me is that too often I feel pretty much alone in how I feel the wearing away of all. There’s always tomorrow to do something I’d rather do now. I want to go, and see, and experience, because I know that time isn’t some wallet full of unlimited cash. Still, even knowing, I’ve forgotten, and THAT really scares me. 

Thinking that tomorrow is a guarantee is a trap, there’s such a cost to pay for that kind of thinking. I’ve paid it, I fucked up. I lost someone I love, and she’s never coming back. I just assumed her clock was wound way better than mine. She was so vivid, I felt like she’d be around as long as the sun. A stupid accident, and she wore away in a blink. I didn’t get to tay good-bye, didn’t get to say plainly how much she meant to me. I took time for granted, it was so unnecessary. t never want to pay that cost again, it’s something I regret every single day. I don’t understand how anybody could pay that cost, then pay it again, and again, and again, but it happens. That also scares me.

Lately, I’m scared a lot, I feel time pressing harder, moving faster.

Anyway, enough of me for now.

5 comments

5 Comments so far

  1. josh August 9th, 2014 12:17 am

    Wow.
    Yeah, just wow.

  2. maria X (Mrs. Xenick in your school life) August 9th, 2014 7:54 am

    Oh boy – wow is right. This was a powerful post, Michael.

  3. michael August 9th, 2014 8:45 am

    josh, maria: Josh could have meant, “Wow, that was absolutely nonsense…”

  4. Tanya Hallam August 9th, 2014 3:36 pm

    THAT was brilliant.

  5. josh August 9th, 2014 4:23 pm

    But of course I didn’t! 😀