Insecure fingers; Secure Nihilism

Now that I am an adult, I am closer to a stroke rather than any sort of development. I resemble a Victorian wife with impaired health, one who never leaves her room. Always bed-rotting and sedated, minus the aesthetic of the haunted mansion, the generational wealth, and the inbred genes.

When I was in high school, I used to daydream a lot—to the point I was so dissociated and detached that I needed a knock or two on the head to get a grasp of reality. If I wasn’t busy daydreaming, I was busy worrying whether I was real or not. I would look at my fingers just to check that I was, in fact, not fading away. If someone ever saw me staring at my own fingers, they’d think I was fascinated, if not amused, by my own hands. Little did they know, there is nothing amusing about short fingers that look like chewed-up crayons in kindergarten. God damn it, how I longed for long, slender fingers—the elegance, the beauty of them.

I have stopped daydreaming. When I close my eyes to sleep, I have nightmares about sinking in quicksand. During the day, I daydream about drowning in the ocean. This redundancy made me fed up and had me questioning my own psyche. Why am I romanticizing drowning? I can’t even swim.

"Remember when you were 17, and you’d be obscenely rich by 22?" I roll my eyes. Wipe that shit-eating grin off your face, you judgmental cunt! It’s truly a talent to humble oneself in such a manner.

The irony is, there is nothing poetic or romantic about drowning. It is cold, silent, and lonely. There is no point in asking myself why when I am already neck-deep in life’s mediocrity. Maybe the real joke here isn’t that I felt like I was drowning—it’s that I thought staying afloat was an option. Naivety becomes me.

I am not drowning in life’s ocean of adventure. I am stuck in a leaky kiddie pool. Stuck. With a brain that won’t shut up. The world outside could burn to the ground, and it wouldn’t make a difference. I’d still be here, waiting for nothing—because nothing ever comes.