Can't Be Fucked

I hate that social media has commodified performative grief and outrage to the point that every fucking person thinks that every tragedy that happens needs to be addressed by them, personally. I hate that there’s an expectation that everyone make some grand statement and that if you don’t do it, you must be heartless or hate the victims. We’re not all celebrities or politicians. Not every voice needs to be heard at all times. The world probably doesn’t NEED anyone’s take if it doesn’t contain new information. Processing things silently isn’t bad and it doesn’t make anyone a bad person and I honestly much prefer it to a lot of the self-serving bullshit you see when something awful happens in the world.

The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.

Sometimes you’re 23 and standing in the kitchen of your house making breakfast and brewing coffee and listening to music that for some reason is really getting to your heart. You’re just standing there thinking about going to work and picking up your dry cleaning. And also more exciting things like books you’re reading and trips you plan on taking and relationships that are springing into existence. Or fading from your memory, which is far less exciting. And suddenly you just don’t feel at home in your skin or in your house and you just want home but ‘Mom’s’ probably wouldn’t feel like home anymore either. There used to be the comfort of a number in your phone and ears that listened everyday and arms that were never for anyone else. But just to calm you down when you started feeling trapped in a five-minute period where nostalgia is too much and thoughts of this person you are feel foreign. When you realize that you’ll never be this young again but this is the first time you’ve ever been this old. When you can’t remember how you got from sixteen to here and all the same feel like sixteen is just as much of a stranger to you now. The song is over. The coffee’s done. You’re going to breathe in and out. You’re going to be fine in about five minutes.

person: what’s up

How do you tell people? How do you tell them that you’re exhausted even though you slept for 10 hours? How do you tell them that you need a break from talking and smiling and simply being near them? How do you tell them that although you love them, you so desperately need to be alone tonight?