Improvidence to me is a rock on the street. I have the strength to pick it up, and hold it in my hand for a while till I regain the strength to drop it. Mostly it's harmless; occasionally it'll fall on my feet and hurt them. That's all the trace it leaves, and yet that's enough trace to change the direction of where the feet go.
Now I recline behind the curtain that is responsible for perpetuating my existence. Only the clicks of raindrops can remind me of the relevance outside. But the weather is fine in my imagination. Between the lines of vehicle and pavement, a verbal joyfulness was radiating.
The sun had vanished when I left school that December Friday. As usual I walked several blocks to the bus stop, which was made inevitable by my carless family and a desire for quietude. En route agitation was scarce - the street was dull as it'd been walked a million times and I was dull as I was a millionth that walked it. Beside me were pedestrians passing by, in a discernible but inaudible voice; behind me was a shadow distorted and restarted by the stars, but beyond me was nothing, a metaphysical nothing eternalized by the dancing wind in which a leaf pirouetted and fell, and the repetition of that process.
The road lamp was turned on by someone amorphous and unsettling to me, who lurked amongst the distance and waited for repentance as redemption. But it didn't disrupt me - it freed me. The saffron of air, the churn of traffic, and the hush beneath them, created something poetic and unpredictable. As I looked back to the length I'd trodden, and forward to the bend I'd turn, suddenly I felt like I was a speck of dust by the windowsill, laughing silently because the laughter was anonymous.
The bus, crammed with people, was also crammed with indifference. Former and latter, which one was more suffocating I didn't know, nor did I care. I was buttoned inside the bus the same way I was buttoned inside the dream - both were shows starring myself as the only real protagonist, and the only real audience. Solipsism, believe it or not, was my guilt of not committing a crime, and the crime of thinking about committing it.
I was caught in a perfectly obnoxious position, disregarded for I was entitled to neither jealousy nor compassion. I closed my eyes for comfort, but the aberration remained there - the fading circle in this corner of my vision denoted the birth of another in that corner - huge objectivity assigned with my own teleology, upon which a relentless soul could feast. And as I got tired of the profundity of that place, the ebb and flow of nothing but my own conviction, I opened my eyes again ready to be struck by the overwhelming disappointment of seeing the same monochromatic and inscrutable things. I confined my frustration to my conjectures, and at some point I believed I conjectured so that I could keep being frustrated. My mere sensibility turned lethal as I began to fret and found a can of milk in my backpack.
A major portion of my life was indulged in banality, that oblivion had become my nostalgia, and anger had become my anguish. I hoped the hopeless, therefore, I lived the lifeless. But when I awoke in that quixotic morning, with light and breeze, flower and candy, I smiled, sincerely, on the blue plastic chair I was actually sitting.
"Fitzgerald concluded his masterpiece by 'borne ceaselessly into the past', I'm not a masterpiece and I don't have a past, but I cannot let anyone be aware of that." I thus told myself and gazed blankly through the window - the emotionless, non-existent God whispered to me:
"Don't part with your illusions. When they're gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live."
I heard him.
I'm here.
