What I Live For


I am an insomniac of sorts and sometimes after lying in bed for hours staring out at the darkness of my room thinking of nothing and everything in a great jumbly way with no order or meaning or hope of sleep, a Thought will come to me.

Perhaps a Memory of the time on a family vacation when, sitting in warm ocean water up to my waist, the movement of the waves and the smooth grained sand beneath my legs made me feel as if I were moving, and the water was still, and if I closed my eyes I seemed to be gliding swiftly back and forth.

Or else an Image of the row of icicles outside the window at breakfast, all glistening in the sun and dripping at different rates so as to create a random pattern without rhythm and yet the falling of each drop is so precise and perfect and sharp it is like music.

Better yet an Idea for a Story about a girl isolated and bitter who imagines each person in the auditorium to be raised up on a spouting column of water whose height is directly proportional to that person's success in life and ha! she towers over them all.

Or maybe a line from a Poem that will read "dead bodies stashed/ inches below icy crust" and refer to the disheartening and depressing and ubiquitous mounds of Snow but the Poem will end hopefully as the girl walks home in a rainstorm that washes it away, and the cars that go by on the road splash the water delightfully, sounding as if they were airplanes lifting off at precisely the moment they pass her due to the Doppler Effect.

No, tonight the Thought is about the sound of my brother breathing which I can hear ever so faintly across the hall and the Connection of this sound to those silly Sleep-Over Parties my siblings and I used to have so many years ago, when, with sleeping bags and flashlights, we crowded into a single room and talked and played games for hours before falling asleep on the floor.

The Thought seizes me and fills me until I can remember the itchiness of the shaggy pale yellow carpet beneath me and a specific night when I made the decision to sleep in the closet and awoke much disoriented and cramped and truly this is all too precious to risk losing or forgetting and so now I scamper across my room over to my desk, legs shivering against the cold, and scrawl in large nearly illegible letters "Sleep-over parties" and for good measure "Closet" and now I can rest assured that the Thought is safe and recorded and concrete.

How can I describe the joy this moment holds: the oneness of being consumed by a single perfect thought or the satisfaction in knowing it is your own thought which no one has ever thought before or the excitement of scampering to a desk with bare legs when you should be safely tucked in bed and also the shot of hope that the moment brings, the conviction that someday I will write something great and it will contain the Thought I conceived at that very moment which is, this time, the Image of a jar of liquid sitting on a dusty shelf and in the liquid particles dance and float, freed from gravity.

I am an Insomniac of sorts and sometimes after lying in bed for hours staring out at the darkness of my room thinking of nothing and everything in a great jumbly way with no order or meaning or hope of sleep, a Question will come to me: why are my days always tired and dull and lifeless, and is there perhaps some greater problem at hand?

The Image of the jar is Myself except the particles are sinking to the bottom overcome by gravity and changeless routine, the inevitable forces, and it is all sinking and settling and separating out into layers as sad as a carbonated drink without fizz.

There is no change except the sludge at the bottom grows thicker, the liquid ever emptier, and soon now if the soul in my body is the liquid in the jar then all my true essence will seep out of my shoes where it has gathered and onto the floor, the scuffed and dusty floors of my school with the classrooms without windows.

What do I live for and how can it be anything inside of those weary, dreary days when I feel as if I am waiting and waiting for nothing but the passage of time? What do I live for and how can it be anything that does not convince me that I am alive?

I am an Insomniac of sorts and sometimes after lying in bed for weeks staring out at the darkness of my room thinking of nothing and everything in a great jumbly way with no order or meaning or hope of relief, a tentative Answer comes to me regarding What I Live For and those nighttime thoughts and questions and scamperings to my desk, including also the sinking liquid and the scuffed floors.

But this Answer dissolves before I can catch it in words and oh I could not scurry to the desk in time and now all that is left is an indescribable feeling and the image of the ceiling above my bed, not smooth but textured and rough and clothed in thick darkness and the memory of the way the cool air brushed against my shivery legs.


Vis Taraz