The desire to simply not exist.
STOP, JUST STOP. Can leaves and people stop in their paths, so that I don’t hear their rustle? Can the wind and paper stop stacking up against me, so that I can accept defeat? Can the rain stop hogging all the gravity, so that I can fall peacefully? And can the world please just stop spinning, because I think I am already sick. Stop, so that I can retreat to anytime before this, anytime before my birth, and after I’m gone.
I want to go back to when I wasn’t. When I try to imagine non-existence the best I can do is, just sleep, for a long time and then some more. It’s almost funny how a concept that cannot even exist by definition holds such a tight grip on my fantasies. Its clench leaves my arms black and blue, and I don’t seem to mind. Because in my utilitarian moments of godlike ability to self-reflect, I see the totality of desolation, my dry-eyed vision, lasers through the meaninglessness of it all. And against all rationality, I fetishize oblivion.
This reverie that one could step out, fetishize an alternative to finally disappear, lurks in every void of self-hatred, boredom, despair, fatigue, and exhaustion. We convince ourselves of the hypothetical steering wheel in our hands, telling ourselves that we have a say in this matter. In the matter of our intelligence, creativity, parents, peers, patience, anger, love, hate, living, death, and birth.
Can the world just please stop spinning, because I have this really bad headache. This desire to not exist is a cry for the pain to stop. It’s begging for the pursuit of happiness to end, and just be. It’s imploring for society to be a community and it’s a request for life to not be the anticipation of death. The desire to be a dinosaur (you know because they are extinct and you don’t want to exist, so that works out beautifully), isn’t to be confused with the desire to be a skeleton. Because non-existence and death are those cousins who seldom talk to each other but are related by blood.
This wish you hold in your heart to escape existence is one I’m afraid will never come true. No matter, you chase it with wild lust and fiery passion, it’s something beyond your human reach. You, like me and many others, need to settle for existence, because giving up, is not worth it. For some reason, against all consumable thoughts, you are on this rock. This rock that births birds, animals, insects, trees, water, and you.
Fortunately, you’ve had moments in your lives that have kept you standing over the nothingness. Moments when you felt like a part of something bigger, that song you listen to on loop, or that one piece of art you can’t stop glaring at for some reason, or the profound connection you share with your friend (friends if you won the jackpot), or the last kiss you had, or the last time you felt happy within for no apparent reason.
Those fleeting seconds that force you to fragilely stare right into the void; to realize that being itself is pure chance. You didn’t exist millions of years before you were born and would be so when you sleep at last.
And that is perfectly fine.
You will reach back there soon enough, in the meantime, why not enjoy and laugh at the absurdity of it all? Why not, rock this rock like Queens, while the Starman awaits?
