This is not the return that I initially conceived.
I can almost taste the residue of broken potential and so closely feel the inept workings of my body when I think of how much my thoughts are alien to everybody else. A shiver in the outlines of my back creeps through and I am struck with helplessness at the thought of another wasted life amidst this Age of Information. It’s yet one more squandered mind that decays from the banality and monotony of instantaneous communication, too rapid and too unyielding.
Every summer is in essence the same. The past month was spent trying to figure something out. I’m still not sure what I figured out, if anything at all. Hours and days and weeks, lost into the virtual breeze seeping out of my televisions and computers and anachronistic CDs. And I had so much in my head. Another sitcom, another song, another verse, another screenplay.
The problem is not my chronic use of chronic. It’s not even the winter-despised and summer-adored alcohol (although the occasional morns were spent in head-throbbing and miserable apathy). The tumor lies in all raisons d’etre, the essence of all selves: a social animal.
Two or three years ago, I might have struck you as a chapped-lipped somebody who asked too many questions when there were no answers. I exist to you today, disillusioned and depleted, robbed of all passions in pursuit of an illusory happiness because of all the buzzes and mumbles in my ear. Too much noise and not enough music.
Ideally I would love to excommunicate myself from all mediums of communication, but I know my short-distanced limits. I need more time to listen and quit seeing. I need more time to feel and quit thinking. So I’ll turn the power off on my cell phone, turn on “All My Friends” and Kid A in the middle of a cloudy night, and dream. Maybe I’ll dream.
