Things
Tilted back in my chair with the blood rushing to my head, pillows hovering in my periphery and indecipherable academic papers mocking me from my desk, all I can think is christ, find something to do before I die.
Find something to do before you die.
My take on things, when I'm feeling particularly inundated with ennui, is that if you pluralize the above sentence, you've got life encapsulated in an eight-word sentence. Thus:
life = find some things to do before you die.
Some things. Sign yourself up for four grey walls and a desk, spend eight hours a day in a sea of white collars doing important things, and call it your job. Grow things in your garden and engage in deep meaningful discussions with your friends about fertilizing your petunias. Go to school and learn some things. Visit some places. Skydive. Keep up with the news. Keep up with new fashions. Nibble round the edges of a biscuit. Buy the same things every week. Join politics and vociferate animatedly against important things. Become president and bomb things. Learn how to play something on a guitar. Write things in an online journal to avoid writing an essay.
Fill your time with something. Anything. Can you fill time with emptiness?
Here's an account of what I'm doing to fill my time, written in second-person, future imperative perspective, because I've been chastised that writing in third-person - in any tense - is unbecoming.
You will tilt backwards in your chair and hope your brain implodes. You will do anything to avoid writing an essay, short of actually, you know, not writing it. You will buy a plane ticket, then squeeze your warm pillow at night and construct a diligent, happy-fuzzy countdown to the 31st. You will eat a satsuma and harbour several reflective thoughts on the fundamental differences between satsumas, mandarins and clementines. You will stare unflinchingly into the showerhead and wage a raging war of gasping endurance with the torrent of glacial water; you will slowly, slowly turn the faucet towards the red H, and dissolve in the blissful gradation to warmth, dissolve in simple, watery euphoria.
You will find some things to do before you die live.