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.