Pastoral Genocide

You eat. You sleep. You dream about drowning, redemption.You wish you lived thousands of miles away, in a place without such discomforting levity. Sometimes, you wish you weren’t you. Or, at least, you wish you weren’t defined by your cheap clothing and the bags under your eyes. You wish you didn’t live a life full of coffee and cigarettes.

But, you eat. You sleep. The days drag on late into the night. Eventually, albeit slowly, you lose your ability to sleep. You lose your ability to believe. In yourself, in anything. Somewhere, somehow, life became confusing. The horizon that is your future has become increasingly dark – clouded with trepidation and uncertainty. Where do you go? What do you do? People tell you to hold on, that things might not be good now but in the future, they will be. The problem is that you can’t imagine a time when things will be good, when you will feel whole or relevant. You can’t imaging that things will improve. You can’t even remember at what point things started to go wrong.

So, you try to eat. You try to sleep. You end up tossing and turning in your bed. You wear your insomnia on your shoulder. You feel empty, hollow. You listen to sad music in an effort to feel better. But you don’t. You feel worse. You lose track of time, you lose track of yourself, and then you stop caring. You think about things you shouldn’t. Afterwards, you feel guilty, selfish, and insincere.

You try to eat. You try to sleep.

It’s a life.