The Act of Zombie-ing

(this is an old essay i wrote...i apologize for being both depressing and over dramatic)
I am starving myself of sleep and I know of others who do the same. We deprive ourselves of rest so that we may zombie our way through this world—bypass feeling and only stagger beyond those truly deep things we should confront. I enjoy the feeling of being physically drained. I give a blank stare in class, forgetting to blink and all the while thinking on all things, except what he is teaching. I find myself perfectly content with being unable to arrive upon even some sorry excuse for a state of happiness. I am also entirely unable to feel the slightest bit of sadness. Instead, I feel nothing but tired.
I crave apathy. Is it possible to actually care about apathy? I happen to think so.
It doesn’t take much effort really. I take my journal to a diner and indulge in an entire pot of coffee that costs an amount just shy of two whole dollars. This reminds me—I have calculated that greater than half of all the things I consume in one day are laced with caffeine, thus making it more and more difficult for me to slow down or even close my eyes. Wait. I take that back. I take most things rather slowly these days. I don’t sleep, but I am getting better at sitting and staring. Sometimes I get the feeling that others assume I am in some sort of crazy trance, and I think that if they ever ask, I’d tell them their assumptions were correct. Is it acceptable to be pursuing a deliberate state of dried up existence? I am quite conscious of what I am doing to myself.
The lack of sleep causes the glands in my throat to grow daily, or maybe this is a result of the increasing amount of cigarettes I smoke throughout the day. Either way, I can feel myself getting sick. I am flushing my health down the toilet only so that I can avoid feeling. My other methods of staying awake involve finding someone new to spend all hours of the night talking to. We do this over a bottle of gin accompanied by a splash here and there of tonic. Sometimes there is a movie playing, but we have been known to sit and stare at the menu screen, listening to that same minute of a song looping over and over and over again. It seems to fill in the spaces of the background quite nicely. A few other times there has been a visualizer on screen, but this is only because my new-found amusement happens to be a religious pothead. After literary conversations, misunderstandings, awkward silences, both the avoidance of eye contact and extensive staring contests; I finally look at the clock and discover that it is early morning. At this point, I can politely excuse myself out into the cold, drive home and find myself unable once again to fall asleep even after I crawl into my bed exhausted. My mind is racing, thinking of the day’s events, though I have decided that I have become all too familiar with such bizarre happenings. So much so, that nothing phases me anymore. This could be the result of the frequency of events, or it could just be my lack of sleep. Either way, one only leads to the other and so there I am—sleepwalking through my Tuesday again. Although I have gotten quite used to this tired feeling, I do find myself scared that I will all of a sudden fall off the face of this planet, or at least get to the point where my I take a face plant onto all of my bad habits. I think I am fading slowly, but what if the process suddenly picks up speed? What if I end up smoking just one too many menthol cigarettes and my lungs actually do crystallize, just as they have always cautioned me about? Even the passing of this thought causes me to realize that I am merely a cowardly tool of society and the idea of productivity, and that I will never be able to commit fully to one thing, not even this progressive self-destruction through sleep deprivation.
I have been tempted to blame my disconnection on the depression I feel inside.
I often wonder if everyone is simply fooling themselves into actually enjoying it all. Half of the time I believe that they are genuinely glad. And yet I wonder, “How could I have possibly been left out of the happy mix?” What have they discovered that I have not? I think I prefer to sit in the corner and assume that they are all faking it, maybe even taking drugs in order to tolerate their boss and force a satisfactory smile.
I think a vast majority of the American population is sleepwalking through their Mondays and Tuesdays and Wednesdays and Thursdays and then spending the weekends hung over. It is downright depressing that we are so content not to feel anything extreme—we prefer a dreamy trance in pursuit of emotionless causes. We do as we are told. We drink too much coffee and take way too many painkillers just to get by. The girl sitting next to you takes a hit in the bathroom so that she can stay caught up, even though it gives her nightmares.
When did we stop waking up to the smell of brewed coffee and replace it with an expensive version of the latte packed with giant proportions of concentrated espresso? When was the last time we paused long enough to study the detail of something we pass on a daily basis? We must break our habits of racing the clock. We must learn to live life as Robert James Waller claims an Iowan would, not as a New Yorker. Cornfields have always made for a better backdrop than skylines anyway. I figure that by this period in history, we should all be striving to live life at the pace of a recently retired man; this might just be slow enough for us to actually recognize the things we are passing by too quickly on the daily train before we clock into our more than full-time job.
I pause and remember, entertaining the idea of returning to more patient times, and then I laugh out loud as I change everything already written from “you” to “us.” My neighbor waves and I smile back and we both take another sip of our coffee.

08.19

I think of long ago home whenever I wade through lapping waves of tumbleweed overgrowth, when I graze my hand over the tall weeds I once mistook for flowers and picked for my mother. I am not afraid to push my nose against the itchy blooms, swallow up the sweet pollen and remember the days of my innocence. Smell the small white house misplaced in the middle of three cornfields while the cattails chase thoughts of farm dogs and speckled robin eggs—of sparklers on the fourth of July and a jar full of expired lightning bugs. I never meant to let them die. Sometimes the nights utter nothing but still salutations to the past and a quiet allowance for hope. The smells are perhaps the most consistent thing about living in the country.

But I left home to live in town, and only when I am not paying any attention whatsoever, does the sweet perfume of lazy summer drift in and steal me away to a place closer to where I already am—to where I already have been. Lost thought moments define the little girl inside of me, and only when I stop to watch the storm clouds wrestle and catch cold raindrops on my tongue, do I find her again.

Of course sometimes I wonder why she still exists.

They say that Ireland is composed of lush countryside—lush with the overwhelming color spectrum green. I am so scared to be more than one hour away from the comfort smells of growing up. It will take much more than an hour-long evening drive to make it back... Yet maybe even more so, I am actually terrified to love the sights and scents of this foreign place more than I do my home. I am afraid to let go. And although I awake to the call of adventure, it is shelter and memory and eventually finding a place to call “home,” that inspire me.

I sit here alone in emotional preparation—with the daunting feeling that accompanies the approaching four month situation of assimilation I am about to embrace. It is a harsh realization that I will be without those I love nestled close by. But it is too late to be kept here, and at the very moment I board that plane, may I already begin to meet characters that might add to my story; may I find both the desire and the means to accomplish more writing; may I quiet my heart once again before the Lord. Perhaps I am anticipating too much—perhaps not nearly enough at all. No matter how it is, nothing can hide that I simply do not know what this excursion holds. With so many expectations and not a single clue at all, I will greet the beauty of opportunity and hopefully grow myself into a person better able to love.

Counting down the days until August 19…

Streamed Vodka Sentencing

It is a giant chasm filled with the void amusement of this world and all trivial matters it brings. Perhaps I should not have such a bleak outlook on it all, but I want to flutter my wings with purpose, fling myself off a cliff and welcome the feeling of a cool breeze pressing against my face. It feels nice swimming through the possibility of mattering. My goal is to walk through this life and be guiltless--floating inches above solid grass, bending not even a single blade for fear of harming a fellow creature. The freedom stars and melted ice cube petals will welcome me to a place of organic dwelling. Some day soon I will paddle through lapping waves of soft, beautiful sea kelp and escape this moment of carbonation and candy wrappers set on fire--of false sensations of passion and incredibly fake jewelry. I stare into the amber syrups of my drink and long to take a dip. They don't need me here on shore, sitting on the rim of dishonesty, bad weather, and bubblegum colored socks. I do not know how much longer I will survive as a fraud. The sharks keep feeding me shots and ask me to join in on a game of billiards. I have nothing else to do but dream so I always consent, for I am secretly hoping to stumble into something authentic.

The creative juices are flowing now, and I can only wish to be squeezed like an over-ripe orange...perhaps I will burst with tangerine flavor and drip molecules of nutrition, offering a fresh start to a new day. The bubbles fill my cup, float to the top, and pop with microscopic splashes spitting on my cheek and stabbing me in the eye. I am lost in hyper-sensitivity, drifting further into dimensions removed from familiarity. Being alone isn't as painful as one might think and as I sit here at the bar in solitude, I can sense the worn-out girls and over-compensating boys quietly saluting my facade of independence. For a split second I agree with them...and then I make faulty eye contact and trip over my own misjudgment. How long can I sit here so exposed?

I can paint my own dream and discover something new about where I can create: the colors, smells, and emotions. I don't want to belong to some place stationary because I am deeply terrified of landing. What if I look around and realize I am truly all alone--or worse, what if I break the surface and find that there are people who care about me more than I could ever do for myself or for them? What if I am incapable of loving? I feel paralyzed, stuck in sadness and dirty laundry. I want to swallow the bar whole, consume all the corruption and misunderstood miracles. Everyone here has significance to the people closest and for tonight, and this night only, they are each superheroes and geniuses, famous people who are going to conquer the world. Why can't we all be caught dwelling in this sink filled with soap scum and possibility? We are all capable of loving and this is what gives us weight--love is what attaches us to gravity; it makes us cry and keeps us close to the core of God-created existence. We sunbathe and skip across parking lots. We laugh and tear up in the same sentence, tripping over name tags and polite introductions. I am thinking of magnets sticking to metal objects that do not matter. And how might we escape?

Trains are crashing into each other, de-railing and threatening to throw off the balance of this world. Sip the gin and tonic to watch the lime pulp particles swirl about the glass and press themselves against the frozen chamber. I want to be alone. The setting itself no longer matters, just the unfamiliarity of the people around me and how comfortable the anonymous make me feel. Call me odd and smoky, but the white roses of thought are all that matter now. I am trudging through wet clouds in green rubber boots hoping to float to the top, and knowing all along that I will never make it there. I can twist and kick and tango up here in a diet coke world of dreamy reality, although chipped nails and a broken pen, smudged words and a dead fly remind me of how much I value imperfection. I must descend from the mountains now, and leave the frost and streaming thoughts behind in order to soak up the musical vodka.