this is going nowhere

I let the water run while I wash my dishes in the dark. 

I think vaguely, elusively, about how someone somewhere needs this water that I am wasting but this thought is, after all, elusive and vague and I can’t find it in myself to care after a 12 hour workday. 

What makes these small everyday tasks so difficult? Why don’t we pick up the things we throw down, replace the toilet paper we use up, turn off the faucet instead of watching it drip drip drip down the drain, counting those countless drops that we will never get back? 

I’m happy, satisfied, self motivated and ambitious. But every time I miss the trash can with my paper-towel throws, I pause a moment before picking them up and placing them in the can, half tempted to walk away and leave the insignificant mess for someone else. One thought stops me: I think, there’s a special place in hell for you, cigan. 

I don’t believe in heaven but I sure do believe in hell. I guess I think that there’s nothing I can do that will redeem me enough for eternal peace. I do, however, think that there are marginally bad things that will condemn me for all eternity. Missed paper towel shots being one of those things. 

I finish my dishes. When I leave, another person walks in to do their laundry and he flips on the light switch as he enters the dark. I feel oddly ashamed of myself, for not having turned on the light, instead preferring to conduct my chores in darkness. When he flicks the switch it feels like he is telling me to grow up, to stop playing in darkness as if it is a game of hide and seek and not a moment of reality. He doesn’t really tell me this, of course. He doesn’t even know me. 

Back in my room I look in the mirror for too long again. Something has changed, right? I must be prettier, uglier, skinnier, fatter today than yesterday. There’s no way a human can move from one day to the next and be the same person as the day before. I want something to change. I want things to stay the same. I want to look in the mirror and see all the things on my face, ears nose eyes lips freckles, in the same orientation in which I left them. I want those things to move into a slightly better orientation. I want I want. I want too much. 

Lately I’ve really been wanting a tattoo, large and garish, so I can actually do something irrevocable that says hey this is me! And I will never be able to change. That’s not how it works but actually doesn’t it work that way? The things we do to our bodies always contains some degree of permanence, this permanence solidified in flesh or just in the way we remember ourselves. When my scars started to fade I actually began to miss those things that had caused me so much pain and that also contained so much pain in them, spiritually, physically, metaphorically. I have a tough time letting go.

I want to remember who I am, squeeze myself into an unbendable, unbreakable cube whose shape I will eventually conform to. Centuries later, I will emerge, cube-like.  

I don’t want a tattoo to remember myself as I am now. The now-me isn’t someone strongly worth remembering. I just want a tattoo because I have convinced myself that the only way for me to live my life is by moving in large increments of time marked by catastrophic things. Car, tattoo, death, love, excellence. These are all things I strive for, some of which I will never achieve. 

I’ve been writing this piece for weeks now. It’s not finished. Let’s call it an evolving piece, to use a different word. 

Have I changed since I started writing? I hope so. I hope not.