meaning

Meaning

Life no longer holds any meaning for me.  All my life I have lived connected to something, certain that my actions held purpose.  That they held some sort of meaning.  Now though… I am not so sure.
I remember when I was still in grade eleven… or sometime around there… my age, like everything else, doesn’t matter now.  A boy died, and it was very sad.  I was very affected by it and I was saddened by how suddenly life could be taken away.  There was a mention on the announcements and everyone was sad for a week or so.  Then the world moved on.  About three months later, a very well known boy from my school died.  It was a great tragedy too.  But this boy was smart.  He was going to become a doctor.  He had a ninety something average.  He was very well liked.  They said his name on the announcements, just like the other boy.  And then they held a mass for him, and then they let students go to his funeral, and then the teachers and principal and chaplain made reference to his death every day for the next month, and I was shocked.  No one else was.  I was upset at the difference with which the two deaths were treated.  No one else was.  I never saw the human race the same again. 
As the years passed and I moved on and forgot how sad it was, I fell into the same thing everyone talks about concerning middle-life: monotony.  Day in and day out.  I woke up at the same time; I went to bed at the same time.  I was single.  I never dated on Friday nights.  I went out Saturday to the same bar with the same friends.  Nothing ever changed. 
Sure there were things here and there.  My mother died, my father came down with Alzheimer’s, and they changed my ritual.  But, like a single fish in the ocean, those things were swept up in the tide of my life, and became part of the same growing and shrinking swell that was my entire existence.  Nothing ever changed.
We are all selfish, truly.  We claim difference in that, that all our actions are selfless, and that we never think about ourselves, but that is a lie.  We are incapable of truly seeing things from another person’s point of view.  We try, and that is what sets apart good from evil.  Evil has no concept of another’s suffering.  But, now that I think of it, is there even anything that is evil?  No, of course not, perceptions and all that jazz, I’m sure the philosophers would agree.  In our minds, the world revolves around us, even though we may be people who spend the majority of our time bettering the lives of others, still we exist in our own world, our own galaxies if you will.  For the past few months, my world has stopped revolving, has ceased to independently function.  Instead, now I revolve around the world.  Seeing, but not partaking, observing, but not contributing.  I have no meaning.  What is the purpose of being in this world if I am simply revolving around it?  What is the point to life if I can’t readily affect it?  None.  And thus my existence has no point.
Today is Saturday, December nineteenth, 1993 at approximately eight seventeen pm.  None of that sentence matters.  I have just awoken, I decided to sleep, I had nothing better to do.  I sit up in my twin bed, in my single bedroom apartment on Duke Street in Kitchener, Ontario, in Canada, in North America, in a world that I aimlessly revolve around. 
I let out a profound sigh.
Tonight may be the last I live.
I had thought about it a lot in the past couple weeks, suicide, that is.  Why?  I cannot say.  Logic would tell me that just because life is pointless doesn’t mean I should kill myself.  I am an atheist, it’s not like I want to kill myself because I want to meet God, or someone like that.  It’s just… well, what is the point of living if every day is going to be like this?  I have no use for life. 
Every moment to me seems like something I have already done, an experience I have already had and now am bored with it.  I spend all my days looking for something I haven’t done, but if it turns out to be something new, I don’t want to do it.  It’s a vicious circle.  So most of the time I become bored with searching and just lie down.  I rarely sleep, I call it sleep because I am in bed, but my eyes hardly ever close, my mind too absorbed with thoughts of boredom.
I learned a new word the other day: apathy.  It means something along the lines of “lack of interest in anything.”  It is perhaps the best word to describe my present mindset.  Apathy with people, apathy with the world around me, apathy with life itself.
The true danger of this depression is that first I become sad, then indifferent to why I am sad.  I could probably find a reason to continue, but I just don’t care.
Care.
What a strange word.  It applies to everything in my life.  My effort is affected by how much I care, and in turn my happiness.  Without caring, how can humanity exist? 
But it does, and it exists in its own net of apathy and disconnectedness.  People claim that they are empathetic; I know that to be wrong.  No one is truly empathetic, they see people, they feel as though they know them.  And yet even your best friend cannot see how you wallow in grief when you are alone. 
People build so many façades, hide behind so many masks, fearing that to expose their inner weaknesses is to be… well, weak.  I know this to be false as well.  And yet I have not come close to telling anyone of my depression.  It is the source and the ultimate failing of humanity.  We know we need each other’s help, yet we will not deign to seek it.  I know that, like the rest of existence, my case it detached from that logic.  I know no one can help me out of this hole.  I have already seen that.  So why bother?  Ah, the ultimate question of my life: Why bother?
I sit up in bed.  I have made a decision.  Why bother to continue struggling up the waterfall of life.  It would be so much easier to fall back and drift down the river of death, letting the current decide where to deposit my body.  Now I realize, there is no reason not to believe in an afterlife.  I probably will wind up in some other world.  But like my present life, that consideration doesn’t matter.  I will die tonight; tomorrow will be empty for everyone else… not me.
I begin considering what I should do.  Pills are risky, so are guns, unless I can get a shotgun… not likely.  Electricity is even riskier than pills, so is asphyxiation.
Wait.
I stop for a moment, startled by my dispassion.  I could have, in the same tone, been thinking about what to make for dinner.  I laugh a hollow laugh as an image of a man ordering a knife and a plastic bag at a restaurant enters my mind.  I shake my head and walk to my kitchen.  Nothing here would be useful.  I decide to go for a walk.
My last walk.
I grab a light jacket, but know, somewhere deep inside, that the cold will not affect me.
The night is cold and crisp.  It has a deep, intimate feel, and the wind cuts against my face.  It has no effect on me.  I see the hanging ornaments and realize I have lost track of the date, it must be close to Christmas.  I know City Hall will be swarmed with people of all ages: children skating on the ice, teen couples kissing in the dark shadows where they think no one will see, adults watching their children laugh and play, delighting in what they have created.
My throat tightens and my eyes burn.  Shake my head clear and continue walking.
I want no human companionship, this is a trip I will take myself, but, for some reason, I find my path inexplicably drawn towards City Hall, with all its pretty lights and pretty families and fake hopes.  I come around the corner and see all the people, less than last year, because, I believe, that the people have come to see the uselessness of the celebration.
I walk up the stairs towards the fountain-turned-ice-rink, I never did enjoy skating, it made my feet hurt.  Not to mention that I look stupid doing it.  I prefer running.  My feet glide over the earth almost effortlessly, my breath coming in ragged gasps, but pushing and never slowing down.  Its something about the wind rushing past me, almost like I am racing my problems and, for a brief spell of exhaustion, I escape them.
I sigh, and sit down on a bench.  A woman, a very pretty woman I notice, walks to sit down beside me, but I look up and glare at her.  She draws back, looking hurt, seeing, as non-empathetic people somehow do, the sorrow and anger in my eyes, my lack of want of company.
Empathy. What a stupid concept.  People claim to have it, yet how many people think I am about to kill myself.  None!  That’s how many.  People need to accept their inability to understand anyone but themselves.
I sit for a few minutes before seeing her approach another man, this one much more receptive.  How fake, how pretentious the human race!  Even her hurt face was a façade!
Everything about the human race is a lie, a protective lie other people seem to put up whenever they want something.  God!  Affection is such a disease!
My mind is spiralling out of control; I’m not even thinking coherent thoughts now.  I sigh again and move to stand, when something catches my eye.  A man, a man who greatly resembles my father.  He sits on the bench across from me, watching what I presume to be his grandson skate across the ice.  The boy turns suddenly and skates toward the old man, but trips over the side of the rink, landing on his chest and scraping his hands.  He sees his hands are bleeding and begins to cry.  As fast as the old man’s arthritis will carry him, he rushes to his grandson’s side, picking him up to his feet… or at least trying.  The old man has not the strength to lift the boy.  Before I turn away, three other people have rushed over to help the elderly man and his son.
I snort, realizing that they all had individual and equally selfish reasons for helping the boy.  One probably hates the sound of children crying.  Another has been abused and now seeks acceptance and praise from any who will give it, and the other… the other… he has his own reasons, I am sure.
I get up and leave.  I walk all the way back to my tiny apartment, suddenly feeling the cold much more acutely.  I realize I am sweating and the sweat on my back is freezing.  By the time I get to my apartment, I am running, and by the time I get to my second story apartment, I am crying.  I cry as I fumble with m house key, I cry as I throw my coat on the stove, I cry as I rush into my bathroom and grasp the largest bottle of pills I have: Advil Extra Strength.  I am still crying when I twist the cap off and spill the pills all over the floor.  I sink to the floor and sob great heaves of my chest.
I cry as I have not since my mother died, I cry for my father, my estranged uncle, my dead brother and for all the friends I am about to leave.
I do not know how long I have sat here.  Hours, likely.  I have cried out all the tears in my body, now they are just dry moans.  I realize how pitiful I am.
Pull myself to my feet and walk to the window of my apartment.  There I see a group of teens throwing snowballs at each other.  They have such a simple life, I decide, then realize that everyone has a difficult life in their own mind, I laugh, a wet, emotionless laugh.
Empathy.
I shoot up straight, feeling as if someone had just hit me in the gut, or in my stupidity.
Of course true empathy does not exist!  But connection does.  Of course we are all selfish, but not always, each and every one of us has to make an occasional attempt at selflessness.  We have to make an occasional attempt at empathy.  Humanity walks a fine line, with each of our individual galaxies intertwined so closely, but with so little connection.  But that connection is there, if only briefly, and if only rarely.  The greatest failing, no, threat, to humanity’s tentative balance is apathy.  With all the galaxies of all our people so closely interlocked, if one orbit of one planet of one galaxy becomes too apathetic, it might spiral out of control, destroying itself, and others in the process.  Such is the metaphor of life.
Looking back on those teens now, I have come to realize the simplicity, the beauty of existence.  That simplicity is found in all those actions humanity doesn’t acknowledge: friendship, conversation, feeding the father who can’t feed himself.  The true joy of life is existing not as the singular mind, but as a community of galaxies, sharing in both the joys and sorrows of each other, and helping to restore each other in the face of the bad.
In the face of those teens, I begin to mend.
I go back to the bathroom to pick up the pills.

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~Chris Rush