When I Woke Up

 As a child, the world is small, the world makes sense. Mother's love is warm, the naps are constant, food appears, I eat, I play, I sleep. The curse is yet to be set upon my unmolded mind. Free, I walk yet unaware of my place. Now I walk still unaware of my place but this time I am aware of that fact. The teachers and adults that know so much impart the knowledge of those before me onto me. I am the torchbearer, the next part of a never-ending infinite line destined to culminate the random bullshit into a coercive jumble and dump it unto the next in line. I lie in bed that night but I am unable to sleep, my mind wanders to the knowledge that has been burdened upon me. "People die," I think. "Mom and Dad are people, so they will die." I get sad, "I am a people'' I discern, "I will die." But why? At this moment I awake, the first taste of existential nihilism is placed within my mind. I think to myself "but I can't. I've only just got here, and the world, no, the solar system, no the universe is so big. Will I get to see it?" Growing panicked I lie there, heart racing as the Ing mind blessed with ignorance dissolves. Now older I have found ways to cope, I tell myself that I can change this world, I can form my place in the entropy of existence, and on this living generation ship is where I attempt to make my place. But each night as I lie in my comfy bed, stomach full, toes warm I fall into dread. Unable to move I see myself as I truly am, a speck on a blemish, on a smudge on a grain of sand within a vast beach that is but a grain of sand, which is within a grain of sand, on one of trillions of beaches. It is difficult to work up determination knowing that one day, all the culmination of my lifes work, my precursors work, my future work will be engulfed in the random chaotic entropy of this cruel unflinching existence. Forced into this world, not of my own will then bestowed the knowledge that I can never truly become impactful. The numbness is not unwelcome. The pain that comes with living is washed away as I realize that it doesn't matter. People notice the change, my eyes lose the glint of youth, the spark that made me study so hard in university washed away and drowned. A conversation with me becomes difficult as I seem to do anything to end it as quickly as possible. Giving effort to tasks becomes meaningless. I realize that the only way to create happiness is temporary because, in the end, everything is. I indulge in drugs, drinking, attempting to give my life meaning through relationships that end because everything does. I see my life falling away and yet I don't care. Running a race only to realize that I'm on a treadmill, happiness but a carrot on a stick, meant to keep me going, yet wholly unattainable. I observe others with disgust and envy. How their life seems to flow and yet I feel sad, they know and they keep running their race. How? How do they continue seemingly full of life? It's a lie, a clever facade, just as people see I. I post my stories and glamour my life so people don't see the dread welled up inside me threatening with each passing day to spill over and drown me until I am forced to take the entropy into my own hands and decide this existence isn't for me. Then maybe one day I find something, maybe a person, maybe a place, maybe a small moment where for once I see how insignificant things are and I say to myself, "It's okay. I don't want to be big" and right there with that one person, or in that one place I let myself realize that we place too much into becoming something. Maybe the point to this is that there is no point. And so despite the dread, despite the looming beasts that threaten to envelop my consciousness, I will keep going. "Meaning is a jumper that you have to knit yourself". I have to Find not what makes me happy, I must find what makes me okay with the fact that everything is meaningless, and in doing so who knows, maybe I will one day find myself looking back glad that I decided to keep trudging. Maybe I will look at myself then and realize that I am happy.