smearing sincerity
This mental space is comforting, maddening, disturbing. An item attempting to leave orbit with no way to judge the amount of fuel it takes to leave orbit, I’m seizing anything flammable and throwing it on the pyre. I can only pray my resources and stamina can outstrip physics, and only then will I know whether my craft can even survive the atmospheric pressure.
The future is so tangible I can feel its inevitability and irrealis in even my most mundane actions. My advisor has been slice time corrected and smoothed and sits before me the concatenation of every time sample simultaneously existing in the moment and serving as the culmination of decades of his actions. His purpose is realized in the fomenting of my labyrinthal crusades, and it could not have been otherwise that he exists in this moment to give me sphinx-like hints to this quixotic riddle.
My erstwhile mind fixates on my own past, my foibles, my inconsistencies, my unworthiness. I’ve been mentally tidying, mending this dusty web of acquaintance. Apologizing for pains I’ve caused is ultimately futile, but somehow any end is better than a loose one. I move from situation to situation, compulsively regurgitating agonies I’d swallowed in vain hope to rid myself of them. My social failures dog me, but hopes of reconciliation and restitution have been long vanquished. Failing toward forgiveness I find only my prostrate shame discarded, the detritus of accumulated actions and reactions no longer relevant to the narrative.
I rouse myself from these seemingly precambrian delusions only to discover I’m entrenched in the same mundane reality I ever have been. Reading accumulates, papers get procrastinated, I impress, aggravate, avoid the same people in the same places, and I remember to walk the dog. The inconceivably numerous voxels of reality concatenate together to form an interminable rope from past to future I am bound to follow. Free will somehow remains: enduring, wieldable, oppressive.