In The Waiting Line

Still Life with a Skull (Vanitas), Philippe de Champaigne, 16xx

I have a very good long term memory. If I say I don't remember it, it's probably because I want to forget it. Despite this, I always feel highly disconnected from the past. My room is littered with little mementos of various places and times because I tend never to return after leaving: I have a safety box-cutter from my ten days working at Amazon, a phonetic alphabet chart for pinning to a monitor from the telephony course I was on in 2007, and I have the old frame labels of my old delivery. Each of those is a concrete object that proves the past happened. I have a much harder time with the future.

In school you're asked 'what do you want to be?' and 'where do you see yourself in X years?'. I haven't been there so I have no answer. Truth be told, like pretending I don't remember something, I probably don't want to expect anything. I'm often content with doing what I've been doing. Things could be much better, I know, and if it's handed to me I'll accept. Otherwise I can continue on as I have done. I'm certainly not striving for anything on the material level. This is my visualisation of the future - a continuation of the present, because there is a fundamental problem at the heart of me. At the moment I'm certainly not depressed, though I have been more than once. Rather, I experience a constant malaise that occasionally raises a highly threatening cognitive dissonance. Namely, mortality.

The story cannot continue without me because I'm the narrator. I exist - the only truth at the ultimate level of doubt. I will continue to exist because that is all I know and have known. I wrote a while ago that "death is an absurdity to the living" which is why many choose to believe in an after-life. Comforting as that would be, and at great mental stress to myself; this is it. The universe is a bitch and she's not going to bestow your existence with meaning. Conferred meaning is meaningless. Everything strives to exist and continue its existence, but that alone cannot suffice for sentient species. I originally thought I was pursuing total knowledge. Now I think I've been attempting to frame knowledge within an understanding of history. Time is experienced at a variable pace, and history is similarly misperceived. It is a jigsaw you have to piece together to see the ancient thread of continuity - cause and effect stretching back to zero. It's what surely stands between me and self-inflicted discontinuation.

Each day humanity is not moving forward is a part of the future being denied in our lifetime. One day it might be you dug up and exhibited in a museum as an illustration of primitive man. I should probably go to bed.

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