my five year plan
future paralysis can't hurt me
I’m on a plane. I’m on a plane to Barcelona. I’m on a plane to Barcelona with no itinerary besides this clear vision of an epilogue I have, the thrill of a gatekept fusion restaurant and my Clarice Lispector paperback keeping me company until I’m sick of my own, which both the width of this copy and my patterns suggest is unlikely to happen: I’ll get sick of everyone long before I get sick of me, which has never failed at shaping me into a very lonely, very happy woman. That’s why her words keep getting under my dehydrated skin, as though I’m more than just her reader and she’s more than my scientist, an astronaut moonwalking on a thought I’ve yet to offer. Someday I’ll stop being jealous of everything good that’s been created by the greats, denying nutrients like the world rotates around me and would be easier if everybody, dead or alive, was beneath me. What feeds the heart bruises and kills the ego. In five years, I hope to have grown up enough to let my ego die of nonsense deprivation or find a spot between boredom and envy to hide in.
Speaking of ego, I’m still on the plane. I just quit my job. Ripped the bandaid to the bone. I’m oozing miracles. People assume one quits a thing they hate. That was not the case. Rarely so. When you begin to hate something, chances are you’re already too late: lifelong tinnitus starts with exposure to a good song. I leave when I begin to hate myself, the first sign of a catastrophe impending. Hungry for meaning and truth, moving sideways and with an arrogant, arrhythmic heartbeat, I just never want to endure for the sake of endurance again. Many will say that a little pain is not a big enough reason to call quits: letting fleeting feelings dictate permanent signatures. It’s okay if we agree to disagree. I love leaving because there’s hardly a reward for staying. They don’t build monuments for staying unhappy or refusing ibuprofen for cramps. I love leaving because I’m still the primary resident of my body and, on a good day, even of my mind.