YOU WONDER “IS THIS ALL LIFE IS?”
And the reason we all avoid letting go of these insecurities, the reason we avoid solving our own issues and our own pain, is that if we do, then all of this really, really important stuff — see this money, and this house, and these fucking orchids? — all of this stuff that feels like it matters like life or death, will probably go away, leaving us simply with ourselves.
And this is a terrifying thought.
Because if it’s just us, we’ll be forced to face the incomprehensibility of our own existence, and confront life’s inherent futility. We will wonder what it was all for and what if there’s no point to doing anything at all? And we’ll think that maybe we did it all wrong, what if this isn’t how my life was supposed to go? And we’ll wonder at how time accelerates unceasingly, and how what once felt like months now feels like days, and how we seem to grow old in ways we never knew possible. And we’ll lay silent at night, with just the sheets and the stars, and try to grasp the emptiness, try to give shape in our mind to what is both infinite yet formless, to tame the very fears that are, as far as we can tell, the only reason we carry on living.
Then we might cry. We may roll over in bed and flip the pillow over and pull the blanket over us as if to protect us against our own thoughts.
But they’re always there, lurking in the shadows, the real monsters under our bed: the monsters hidden in our own minds.
And the next day, when our co-worker asks how we’re doing, we’ll say, “Fan-fucking-tastic! You see the game last night?”