the seduction of caring less 

A story about recklessness, youth, fragility and uncertainty.

The last few weeks of her life were a blur. She had ended one part of her life, and being emersed in the surrealness and shock of it’s after effects — had thrown out everything else that had come with its stability. She forgot about schedules or calling her mother regularly or eating a balanced breakfast. She forgot about alarm clocks, instead dashing out of the apartment all showered and dressed within the hour of making plans. Her heart raced as it spun in the magic of being alive. She wore the coat of spontaneity like an old t-shirt reserved for days spent lying in bed. She talked to strangers, befriended them and told them all her secrets. She then spent the next few days mourning their loss from her life. She couldn’t see past a week tops and enjoyed everything that came with the uncertainty.

Young and naive, she felt invincible and more alive than she had felt in a long time. It scared her sometimes, how this not having a plan or blueprint in the future, was okay and even worked for her — temporarily anyway. Her head spun thinking about how there was no constants whatsoever. Her bed, her french press, the mug she had drank two years worth of coffee in — that was all her constants and they were all objects and sentimental material possesions and didn’t count.

She wondered about certainty and whether anything she did now had a finite impact on the rest of her life. Whether the mistakes she would allow herself to make would ever have long-term consequences that she couldn’t shake of. And she thought about mistakes, whether there was such a thing, whether making mistakes were living life and making mistakes were part of not being a wallflower.

She wondered about sentimentality and whether firsts or lasts or brief relationships and encounters meant anything more after the moment or time was over. Whether they were meant to be enjoyed and cheriched and learnt from…..and then forgotten without letting it permanently take up room in a heart that was open, inviting and easily hurt. Whether anything good came out of living too much too quickly, to burning and scraping by. If living too hard came at a cost and left one’s heart a little more broken and unrepairable, or whether permanent damage to one’s liver had already been made.

The idea that people and memories were like a game of musical chairs made sense, despite the sadness that was confined within those words. People and memories constantly ebbing and flowing and replacing each other as time continued on and on. And that each individual or each memory was as good, even great, than the next and that she couldn’t be sad about one leaving because there would be another, and another after that. And that musical chairs only stopped becoming fun when all the memories and people were out and she was the only one who survived and the music stopped.

She wondered how people that didn’t go all out, that didn’t gamble safety and security and protection, lived — whether they slept soundly at night or whether they paralyzed at the realization of how much living they had yet to do. Or whether, in the opposite spectrum, they thought about all the did and what good came from it except exhaustion and funny stories for boring dinner parties and questioning of one’s life desicions.

The transient nature of it all scared her more than she would admit. The seduction of endless glasses of wine, of smoking without concern, of blazing without consequences: it was the only way time would stop for her. Or really, it was the only illusion in which time appeared to stop for her. And that’s why she partook, not because she hated her life and wanted no part of it, but because she loved her life and its oppurtunities and couldn’t handle its contantly changing character. In her drunken state, it was the only time when life didn’t seem so fragile, when she couldn’t lose or win or be fully absent or present. Only between hiccups and a throbbing headache was she detached from life, in a way that she could only consider healthy because she had to remind herself over and over that it would all pass one day.

And so she found all the ways to escape time because she couldn’t bear change because it meant the end was closer, and she was getting older and people were moving on and away from her.