Universal Ruler's blog: "Rambling Randomness"

 I'm drifting.

It's a hell of a thing to drift through your own life. To haunt the places you've called home, to live without really living. I don't even really know how long I've been here like this. It seems like an eternity, but it can't have been more than just a few months at most. I think most people would find it boring, and it is, but in a Zen kind of way. After a while, you just sort of tune out and ponder the greater meanings. Which is what lead me to thinking about this in the first place.

I guess the big question I keep asking is, “What is living?” I mean, what does it honestly take to constitute life? The more I think about it, it seems that living is progression. I've started to believe humans are more like sharks than we'd care to admit. We need to keep moving, propelling ourselves forward, or we'll die. If that's the case, does that make us mindless? Simple automatons that are active simply because we have to be? I think it does. We do the things we do because we have to, because we don't have a choice. Oh, sure, there are some choices. What to eat, what to wear, where to go. But if we stop doing those things, we die. So how can we say we truly have free will? And if we stop moving, does this mean we're no longer alive?

I stopped moving a while back. Like I said, I'm not sure how long it's been. At some point everything started to run together. I guess the monotony will do that to you. Endless strings of daytime talk shows and cigarettes, the same bland meals day after day, the same act of waiting for the day to darken so you'll have an excuse to go to sleep and get away from it all for a while. And it's strange, because once you stop moving, time becomes mutable. It's like you create your own personal time vortex. Time slows and speeds without any sort of reason. Days creep past and nights blow by. And you're left with your questions and your ponderings, or at least I am.

I remember how it started. Or at least, I think it was the start. She left. It's as simple as that. She was my world, and she left, and I was stuck in this place with what felt like nothing. If you make someone your world, and your world is destroyed, are you still technically alive? I mean, we can't live without the earth. So, if she leaves, doesn't that mean that by proxy she's taken all my oxygen, all my shelter from the cold? Doesn't that mean that she's taken my life?

After she left, I lost my motivation. Lost my motivation to talk to anyone, then to leave the apartment, then to get out of bed at all. I lost my forward movement, my progression of life. She still has her life. She left, meaning she has forward motion. I stayed behind. She propelled herself off of me, stopping me from continued motion, a simple act of physics. I was a body at motion until an outside force acted upon me to stop said motion. There was a transference of energy, wherein she took my energy to fuel hers. Does anything in that scenario constitute free will? I didn't ask her to leave, didn't ask her to steal my motivation or my energy. And yet, it happened. I stopped moving.

So the question is, am I alive or am I dead? I haven't left my apartment in what feels like weeks. And the time seems to have run together, with huge gaps in it. I don't remember the last time I ate. I feel like I haunt this place, like I'm just drifting around. Everything seems exactly the same as it always has. So if there's no sense of motion, doesn't that mean that, like a shark, I've died? I've stopped swimming, I've stopped moving. I find it odd. Once upon a time, I didn't have the free time to think about these things, but now I do, meaning my life is no longer filled with motion. Am I simply a ghost, left to haunt the places I used to live? And if so, doesn't that mean that I'm as much a mindless machine as a living human, as mechanical in my drifting as I was in life? Am I really alive or did a lack of motion take my life?

What is life if not forward motion?