Sisyphus

In the spring break of 3rd year, my friends and I found ourselves in a V for Vendetta themed bar hidden in a corner alcove of the cobbled and winding streets of Prague. Masks on, drinks in hand, we went around in a circle declaring what phrase it is that we lived by. I said nothing lasts. Fairy said everything passes. And if you cut through the language, dust away the subjective connotations that crowd around the sharp edges of its core, we really just said the same thing. Even if we didn’t mean to.

I wonder what it was back then that I was so desperately trying to cling to. I didn’t think my mental state was any better than it is now. I didn’t realize I was happy then. Maybe I wasn’t. I probably wasn’t. I think I was just more obsessed with control, stuck on the idea that if everything around me fell into place, I would too. If there was no permanence, what was the point? I don’t think that anymore. Two years later and everything else has changed but I have not. Not really. Not in the ways that I would say matter. Not in the ways that I would say are better. I get a day here and there, a week if I’m lucky, where life is okay. And I am okay. But it doesn’t last. It’s an overextended rubber band, and it’ll always end up snapping back to this person that I’m apparently meant to be. I know my mind is unhealthy, sickly, dangerous, waving around so many goddamn red flags that the field is empty. And I really wish I didn’t know, because I haven’t quite mastered unthinking thoughts the way I have mastered undoing memories. So now instead, I lay paralyzed, eyes squeezed shut, counting the hours until everything passes.What else is there to do?

There is always a fight to be had, something else to wish away. And the only solace I get is in the jealousy I feel in knowing and hoping that not everyone thinks the way I do. Boy is simple. Boy is kind. Boy cares about all of the wrong things. Boy is happy, I think. I hope. And in this jealous relief, I’ve also managed to trick myself into thinking that this despair gives me depth, insight, a precious consciousness no one else will ever know. But in the whispered corner of my mind, I know misery is just misery. And when time pushes me through to the end of one, I find myself back to where I started, a new one at my feet. And everything that is life to everyone else are just these side quests to juggle in one hand, with the other trying to keep this progress that I think I have made going. If there is a hell, I’m not so sure dying will make any difference.