Finitude
Last week, I was brought to my knees by daylight saving time. As I rejoiced at the newfound sunshine throughout the day, the brightness of my commute home, my body couldn’t find rest. I tossed and turned through each night, moving through my days in a sort of haze. Among a rising workload at work and a faint cold, I skipped writing for the first week in months, a relief considering my overwhelming tiredness.
But my week without writing continued beyond my Thursday. I spent countless hours on my phone scrolling through YouTube shorts, and my recommendations went from video essays about art to Pokemon speedruns and chess videos, how it looked before I started trying to make all of my life focused on writing. My work extended past my normal hours, and I agreed to design a poster for a friend’s EP release party. Without putting time aside for writing, my time was filled anyway, with things still worth my time. I imagined my life without writing again, as I do whenever I’m feeling off, one where I let other hobbies float in and out of my life or focus only on my health and my social life after work. It didn’t seem any better or worse.
Ennui has been the prevailing feeling lately. I’ve been productive at work and given more responsibility. My workouts have been going well, and I made a cool poster despite being a mediocre graphic designer. The weather has been so beautiful in San Francisco. Yet, everything seems too finite for it to matter that much. I’m so tired of the limitations that come with life itself.
Even as I luxuriate in the sun’s rays on a blanket on a perfect day in the park, even as we talk about everything under the sun, the words must come to an end, and there’s always more distance forming between any two people. You can never be there for every important moment. I miss out on the moments of my friends’ growth; I miss out on my parents growing older; I miss out on my cousins moving toward adulthood, and I feel like I’m only getting more distant from everyone the moment I leave them.
I think about people from my past so fondly, and they’re not even the same people anymore — they live their own lives as they stay frozen in time in memory. The differences between the two versions of them keep compounding, and I stay holding onto an old picture, a moment of time that will be lost to the wind.
God, if I had endless energy and all of the money and time like water, would I be shedding tears for the impossibility of experiencing it all? How can one feel grateful for some things when everything comes at the cost of another? Can I not be so greedy as to want it all, to be so expansive that the world will fit into my arms?
In his essay “On Transience,” Sigmund Freud writes, “what is painful may none the less be true. I could not see my way to dispute the transience of all things, nor could I insist on an exception in favour of what is beautiful and perfect.” He goes on to emphasize how transience doesn’t change the worth or beauty of the world, but this is not what I wonder. I know that transience and beauty live within each other, but why can’t I experience it all? Why must I be so small and so constrained?
It’s what Hanif Abdurraqib is asking with the title of his poem, “If Life Is As Short As Our Ancestors Insist It Is, Why Isn’t Everything I Want Already At My Feet.” It’s a question that has no answer, other than platitudes about life not being fair or how desire itself is the path to unhappiness. Maybe that’s where I have to land once I finish questioning, if I ever finish questioning the tragedy of it all.
I wish to imagine possibilities of more, of plenty, of fulfillment, of endless restful nights of sleep, of satisfaction from every moment, of rivers of love and warmth like fuzzy blankets in the winter, of cold drinks on hot days all the time, of the end of suffering. Not just for me, but for everyone. I wish and I wish and I wish, and it may never come true.
We must do what we can to push back against the genocide in Gaza. Things are only getting worse. Calling your US representatives to support de-escalation and a ceasefire, donate to Care for Gaza, a grassroots organization delivering food to Palestinians, or buy e-SIMs to keep folks connected to their families.
💧 Drops of the Week 💧
PLAYLIST - ambient - collecting my favorite ambient records
POEM - “Oakland in Rain” by Aria Aber - It felt foolish to consider my fate, the idea of premonition.