Alienation

It's now and I'm here–which, if you think about the world, and I mean really think about it in its entirety, the oceans, the milky way, the fucking cosmos–is all that actually matters. My physical presence is sitting on this beige sheet that I monotonously picked out for myself at Kmart like some cheesy, pathetic loner is all that actually matters because because some fucking terrorist or religious fanatic acting in the name of some prophet who died before modern society even existed is going to fly a plane into a nuclear power plant or we're just simply going to "need" ourselves into oblivion. Needing things and contact and notoriety until our Twitters fuck our Blackberrys and everyone's iPads overdose on organically produced methadone.

What's hilarious is that I'm an optimist. I never think about hating the color of my sheets and I always try and keep my tone upbeat and pleasant, especially in the morning. I just know the reality of the situation as a whole now. And there's some interplanetary super spy staring at me right now through my window, only by the time he sees me the earth will be nothing but a detonated bottle of overpriced perfume.

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I have a routine-which is hardly odd by animal standards-I get up each morning, start the coffee pot, microwave myself a bowl of steel cut oats with light brown sugar, open up my laptop and turn on CNN. Now, I am by no means a "well-informed citizen" as they're so affectionately referred to, but I try to absorb as much daily world updating as possible while checking my various internet sites. See, at one time I collected vintage cameras, and now I sell them on eBay. So each morning I check my order status and organize my inventory online. It's fairly boring and this particular morning was no different, until it was, suddenly, drastically different. 

The sun does a nice job of flooding my kitchen with light in the early part of the day and as I got up to pull a spoon for my oats out of the drawer, it happened. A particularly strong ray of light reflected off of the spoon and bounced right over to the coffee pot, swiftly cracking and breaking the glass. Knowing that this would undoubtedly make me late to work I scrambled to clean the mess, when again, a reflective beam of light shot through my window and hit me square in the eyes. Frustrated and nearly blinded I reached up to the counter, put on my sunglasses and went to the window. It was early fall and the sun was still strong but I had never encountered anything like this before. There is no way for me to explain what happened next and for your to believe me, but I don't know how a person could ever-if ever he wanted to-make up such a story.

When I got to the window I looked up toward the sun, or what I thought was the sun until the light was gone. I realized only then that the morning light comes through the opposite window. I looked towards the spot where the reflection had come from and it passed by my window twice more before I saw that it was a star. Or what seemed to be a star, but could really be anything-a moon, a meteor, a space station, or a planet. I don't know how to describe the feeling I had at that moment other than "unwaveringly solid intuition". I knew I was being watched. I could feel it, like in the third grade when you could feel the nun creeping behind you in chapel, just ready to force you to swallow your chewing gum.

That's when it occurred to me that the world was already over, or might as well be. You see, light travels quickly, but even so, the closest possible planet harboring life would have to be millions of light years away. This means that the thing staring in my kitchen window that morning was seeing me now, but from millions of years in the future. Just like the stars that we stare up at have probably long since burned out, the image of me eating my breakfast in my boxer shorts has long since evaporated. Makes you wonder why we bother.

all writing on this blog, copyright of Adria, 2010.

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