6:33PM: there is this good feeling you have when you’re younger, like a teenager to maybe 25 years old, that the world is ready for the possibility you have to offer it. there are schools giving you tours, meetings with little committees, loans from people investing in what they think you will bring to the world. people are depending on you, sort of. passively monitoring you, in hopes that the good thing they thought would happen to them will happen to you instead.

you have all of these ideas about what you want to do with ‘your life,’ which is hard to imagine because it seems so far away. it feels like you can do anything. feeling like you can do anything makes you feel like doing nothing, which is okay, or…what else could it be but okay. they must be preparing another ‘you’ with the training you didn’t receive, to guide and someday replace you, and however you fill your life while you wait is inconsequential. maybe you do too many drugs or have bad relationships or get in trouble with money or police. i don’t know. so you think ‘there is still time, i will take a break. after the break the bad thing will feel over. people will have forgotten and maybe i will have changed or forgotten. then i’ll get back to all of those other exciting things i was going to do.’ there is so much time.

but the break thing.

i don’t know.

you end up 27 waking at 4PM feeling like some kind of experiment. like you have switched from the thing you used to be to a new thing that’s being studied. but you don’t feel important enough to be studied, no one is actually studying you. you have just allowed yourself so many ‘breaks’ after so many ‘bad things’ that you feel the best thing is to isolate yourself from the possibility of more bad things, and sort of hope no one knows this, or. people wonder where you went, you think, but you hope no one is really paying attention, and they aren’t really.

the ‘experiment’ thing is more like this sensation that the people who talk to you feel like they need to be careful. they are aware of the things you thought you would be. they want to be careful not to remind you of those things, or pretend you are still capable of those things. you can see when they are being kind to you, just in little ways, like you are way more aware of when anyone is kind to you accidentally, and it fills you with thing, this sadness for yourself and for person who did the kind thing and for everyone who wants a better life. you don’t actually feel the ‘everyone’ but you have this idea that it’s probably everyone, and the feeling…the wanting feeling after the accidental kind thing…the feeling is big enough in your body that you feel confident saying things like ‘everyone.’