I wonder if I can delete myself from existence. I wouldn't have thought so but since deleting social media and then losing my job and not checking email, not needing to do things, I kind of wonder. My days have no bustle to their beginnings now, no one needs a thing. I made whole life plans that grew and built and tumbled just as quickly and it made not a dent in the world of downward turned heads, necks not even sore from staring at phones. I never bothered to tell most people I wanted to move, I was interviewing for jobs, I was thinking of leaving my life.
No one ever knows what's happening with me now other than the people who live in my house and obviously there are days when they don't either. They have their lives and I don't need to share what is happening in mine. I watch theirs turn like the pedals on bike spokes and I sip coffee, watching. Sometimes the quiet and anonymity of that feels good, freeing, calm. Other times I realize that my quiet affects no one. If I make not a blip, no one notices and so I know there's a truth of how I do not actually matter.
It's a bit of an existentialist dilemma. Life is meaningless and you die. The teenagers in my classes loved talking about that even though they often grew quiet and weren't quite sure what to say, like you'd caught a thought they had in a net and showed it to them. It caught their breath midair. The idea that life is meaningless and then you die feels like our culture had a teenaged temper tantrum. Like it's bigger and louder and more frightening that anything actually real. It'll settle down in a moment and take a nap. It won't last.
And what I know of my own existence's meaning is that even if it doesn't objectively matter, it matters to me. Even if my life is meaningless and then I die, I like being alive and enjoy being a body observing the way leaves flow in a breeze, the sound of maples as a wind swooshes through branches is like the way my hair flows when I turn it back and forth under water in the bathtub. I can do that for long thick moments. I like that. I want to live in viscosity. I mean, not always, obviously. Sometimes I'd blip myself out of existence for a bit.
When I got none of the jobs I interviewed for and then found myself stuck with a life that wasn't exactly what I was aiming for, there was part of me that wanted to curl up around a gun and let it rip me out of that situation, tear my viscera apart. Not that I was suicidal even though I know it sounds that way, but more that the thought experiment of it would flit across my consciousness. But I am too vain, too selfish for that sort of giving in. I still hope to matter. I still hope to do something great. Write a great book, really. And even if I don't, I like so many parts of life that I'd not give up over this hiccup.
I like to watch the world and see connections. To view the striations in rock and imagine how they are like a petrified trunk from a time when trees were thicker, wide as rivers, tall as mountains. I like to stare into a tiny of puddle of water and watch a waterbug's shadow at the bottom, with rings of rainbows as it dances its circles. To watch for the rupture of a tent caterpillar's silken nest to see them all freed to gravity and an uncertain and ravenous future.
Still, this reforming I'm currently doing, it is lonely and also not. I wonder if I even really want to be around others. I find them overwhelming. Sometimes other people, any other people, overwhelm me. Then I feel like the lonesomeness of this time is a deep breath I can enjoy. I don't need anyone else's thoughts on it. So perhaps I will delete all my online presence soon. Delete my goodreads, this blog and any others. Maybe I'll no longer have email. Maybe I'll delete myself from all digital space and see how it feels to journal only in sand where the wind will take my words almost as soon as they form.
Maybe
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