I was reading a book with an unhappy ending, and it went something like this. You awoke
every morning at exactly the same time, and with exactly the same expression of quiet
desperation on your face as every other day. You shifted around in your sheets for a while,
still cool with the morning air, and attempted to put off the day for as long as possible.
But that was the thing about the days; they were as relentless and unforgiving as the
Earth revolving around the Sun. There was nothing that could be done to prevent it from
happening; it was just another inevitable consequence of the laws of physics, and just
another event that was completely out of your control. The same as most things, really.
After this tug of war with the universe was over, you dressed into your normal-people
clothes, and with that the charade of pretending to be a normal person started, and it would
continue until you came back to sleep in the evening. The days were just a blank stretch
of time to fill with any meaningless activity until you could escape to the land of dreams
once more.
You might take yourself for a walk now and then, puppeteering your body through the world
that seemed every bit as absurd as you pretended it was. You might make sure that you were
feeding yourself enough, or you might not; tricking yourself into thinking that not eating
agreed with you. You might decide to call those friends you have been meaning to for
the past few weeks, or was it months now? Although perhaps not today; they were probably
busy doing normal-people things, and had far too much in their schedules to make an appointment
to talk with you. The weekends came and went without many productive things being done,
and you wonder how all the people on the streets outside seemed to live so effortlessly, as
if existing in the first place did not take up most of your mental energy. You wondered
if they, too, were pretending to be normal people just like you. Everything always looks
perfect on the outside, but the inside was a much different story indeed.
The work week rolled around, and you put on the shirt that had not been ironed yet, and
the tie that you still had not figured out how to tie properly. A half-rushed knot was
all that it was; a perfect metaphor, really. The office was the same as it was the week
before; the same desks and printers and people that were boring enough to be just another
piece of the office furniture. You checked your inbox for any e-mails and there was nothing,
and thus concluded the most productive session of the day. For the next few hours, you half-looked
at the numbers fleeting across the screen, pushed from one spreadsheet to the next, not
caring to think about what they meant. It did not really matter; you were there for
the express purpose of making money for the higher-ups, trading in your time for a few
paper bills in your wallet at the end of each month. Just enough to keep you alive from
this month to the next. You decided to go for a cigarette and ignored the yellowing
around your fingernails for now; the chemical cocktail was more important for getting through
the day. You checked your watch, and about five minutes had passed since clock-in. You
sighed, and went back inside.
The bus home was late, again, so you waited in the shelter, watching all your work colleagues
drive home in their cars, or perhaps they were going to the pub for a drink. In any
case, you were not invited. The journey home was slow, as usual, and it seemed like everyone
in the damn city had specifically taken this route home to delay you further. How thoughtful
of them. The colours of the shop windows and neon signs reflected in the bus window, and
blurred together in the raindrops. They were hinting at something greater, something more
than this endless and tiresome charade, but you did not know what that something was,
and the bus drove onwards. Everything scheduled, everything deterministic. You were nothing
more than a cog in the infinitely more complex machine that was the universe. Everything
was already planned in advance, and you had no say in the matter. Your lines had already
been scripted, and all that was left for you was to play the role.
When you finally arrived home, after a day that could have conceivably stretched out
forever, there were only a few hours left before the same events would be replayed.
You might have read a book, or played a game, or chased a high. Anything to distract yourself
from the crushing lack of anything of much importance in your life. In these few hours
that were your own, any other fantasy was better than this one. In these moments, reality
always had this strange feeling about it. Something unearthly and distant. You could
never usually figure out that that feeling was, but in these moments, the answer was
clear. It was that reality was made for others, and not for you. In the early hours of the
morning, you headed upstairs. You took off the skin of the functioning human you had
been wearing all day, and crept into the cool of the bed-sheets once more. You tried to
sleep, but found that you could not. You tried counting sheep, but the sheep were all holding
shotguns towards your head, and every awkward silence and bad memory was like a bullet in
your skull. The whole orchestra was a cacophony of cruel laughter at your expense, where your
life was both the joke and the punchline. That was the truth of it. In your darkest
moments, where you looked towards something out there for comfort, something more than
yourself; there was nothing and no-one. In this dance with misery, you were well and
truly alone. Slowly, you drifted into sleep.
You found yourself in a forest. It was dense, and there was no light coming from the leaves
above, and you were surrounded with darkness. You tried to feel your way around for a little
while, searching for some light at the end of the tunnel, but the forest was so thick
and the path so dark that it was impossible. There was no way out of the maze, and you
cursed the universe you were born into, like it was listening, or that it would care even
if it was. The whole world could have passed through you at that moment, and in all honesty,
you could not say that you cared all that much. You dropped your head into your hands,
cried a tearless whimper, and resolved to stay inside the forest forever.
out. It is quite literally impossible to see the wood for the trees. In our lives, and
whatever direction in which they lead us, we can become so bogged down with the puzzle
pieces of our existence that we forget how the pieces fit together to form a complete
image. The thing about being stuck in a forest is that the path only becomes clear when we
allow those with a different perspective to guide us, and tell us which steps are safe
for us to take. Puzzle pieces are meant to fit together, and our lives are no different.
Our first-person experience of the world can only ever give us an incomplete picture of
the world, and we are always dependent upon others to make the whole truth known. Then,
and only then, will the light at the end of the tunnel make itself apparent. The world
can get us down, and all of us have our own forests in which we become stuck from time
to time. Existence is difficult. But it was never written down that we needed to face
it alone. When you need help realizing that the present is worth living for, it is. When
you need help to understand that the future is a place you will want to visit, it will
be. And I’ll make a promise with you now - if you can do this, then I’ll do the same.