I know exactly how you feel

““What even is life?””

What even is life? I think about this so much and I feel like I am the only one. Rarely will I ever say… “So the other day I was just sitting at the reception desk and I caught my reflection in the window and I was looking back at myself as though I was someone else looking from the outside in, and realized I am living human being that other people perceive and I will never have an idea how it feels to look at myself while not being myself…” rarely will the other person reply “Yeah I know how you feel.”

Rarely has anyone replied “I know exactly how you feel. Sometimes I look around and feel lost because the only meaning that exists is the meaning we put on things and everything can either have no meaning at all or all the meaning of the world if you choose.”

Rarely does anyone reply to me “I know what it’s like to live your life as if you’re watching yourself do it from a third perceptive. I know what it’s like to to watch the kids running on the sand and try your hardest to remember what it felt like when you were that age, but you feel like an imposter in your own memories.”

Rarely does anyone reply to me “I know what it feels like that no matter how hard you try to go back into the past you can’t. I know what it feels like to wish more than anything you could time travel and experience it all over again, not because you didn’t enjoy your life, but because you want to enjoy as many as possible.”

“I know what it feels like to enjoy the most incredible day and yet the whole time you’re counting down the minutes and then the incessant thought of not wanting it to end makes it end quicker.”

“I know what it feels like that no matter how hard you try, no one understands you. You try your best to explain how you feel, you’re a incredible writer at that, people say that your words help them, that no ones ever been able to describe what they’ve been feeling so precisely before, and yet somehow you still feel as though no one will ever be able to do the same for you in return.”

You should feel less lonely to know that some people out there connect with your words, that’s the whole reason you do it, the whole reason you write. But for some reason it makes you feel even more lonely, because even though you tried your hardest to describe what you were feeling, it still doesn’t even come close to doing so. And so when someone connects with it, it’s still not even close to connecting with how you really feel.

Majority of your time doesn’t even feel real. You feel as though if you were to die you might wake up again in the hospital as a baby and relive the entire thing all over again. That around the age of four the mural ceiling of the tea room will enter left stage into your brain and your first memory will form. You will go to preschool and marry your first crush, your father will let you watch Spongebob while your mom’s at work because she doesn’t approve, you’ll lose your first pet because it hops over the fence and gets eaten by a mountain lion, you’ll listen to “Stacey’s Mom” on the cassette in the red Ford Bronco, you’ll cry in your fathers arms exiting the movie theater after watching “King Kong” for the first time. The plastic of the toy firetruck will run itself along your fingers as the soft cloudy carpet of a foreign apartment floor plays with your toes. You remember eating oatmeal at a table and wondering where your mom is. Later in life you’re told your parents separated and you spent a lot of time at your father’s apartment.

Majority of your time, you don’t feel these memories are yours. It all feels too weird.  How could these memories feel so fresh in your mind when they happened twenty six years ago?

What even is time? It’s invisible, you can’t even see it. You don’t even really feel it until it’s over. And is that really you feeling time, or is that just your knees hurting because you got older. Just because you got older doesn’t mean time came along and whacked you in the knees. No, time isn’t something physical that can hurt you and yet what do you tell the family who just lost their son from cancer? What do you tell your father when he loses his father? That there is no such thing as time? That he would’ve died regardless of how many years he lived? That as he turned one hundred and four he had just as much chance of living another year as he did when he was five?

No, you can’t tell them that time isn’t real. Because it is very real. In fact, it’s probably the only thing that does exist. And so why does it feel so very unreal?

Why does each day blend into the next and the only way to tell that a new one began is because it turned dark for nine to fourteen hours? Who made up the rule that when that happens it means you get to start over? Or not?

Who decided that some people don’t get to wake up when the light comes around again?

Who decided that some babies are born with a disease and some are born healthy, that invisible chromosomes can break off from a human’s deoxyribonucleic acid and reattach incorrectly?

Who chooses who lives and who dies?

What happens when that person dies? Where do they go if they aren’t here anymore?

What’s the point of here? What’s the point of being born if you just die?

Why are we the only ones in this apparent universe that apparently is ever expanding infinitely into nothingness?

How is something made from nothing?

Where did the first human come from?

Where did that monkey come from? That fish? The water? Where did that plant come from? Where did the dirt that the plant grew in come from? Where did that rock that the dirt was on that the plant grew from in the water that the fish came from that the monkey turned into that the human was born come from?

How the fuck did all this happen? And why aren’t there more people sitting on a bench wondering these same things?

Why is everyone going about their pilates and lifting their weights, drinking their coffees and painting their nails, clocking into work and paying their bills to care for the family that they chose to have with one person that they promised to love forever?

Why are we doing all of this? What is the point? What do we get at the end? We get to die? And we don’t even know what happens then.

It’s not even like we’re given any sort of clue what to do when we get here. It’s not even like anyone is doing it better than another or someone is doing it right and someone else wrong. It’s the fact that out of nine billion of us, not a single one knows what the fuck we are doing.

And the scariest part of all of this, is that no matter how much you think about it, share it, talk about it with someone, even if someone else were to get it- it doesn’t change anything.

You still don’t know the point of it all. You still feel like these memories aren’t yours and yet somehow they make you you. They are what you share to allow someone to get to know you. No matter if you find my forever person or not, they won’t be with you forever. They will disappear one day and there’s nothing you can do about it. Your mother will leave, your father will leave, your grandfather will leave and join your grandma. And you will never be able to touch, talk, or see them again. They will simply be gone.

And you won’t even know where they went.