I have spent the last three years convincing myself that my interests, my gifts, all point towards physics. Now that I have finally reached a point where I am starting my journey, I am already at a standstill. The material seems so complex, and I am falling incredibly behind. I have failed two midterms this week and have just been completely stumped on an assignment that is due tomorrow – I can’t even find where to begin. I have forgone the assignment completely in frustration, at a sure cost of 3.5% of my final grade.

I am build up with an intense desire to weep, and I now know the power of what I am getting into.

There is some comfort in the fact that 68% is what I need as an overall average, but as it stands right now, I am below that.

There needs to be a swift change in my learning, but I know not how to shift it, for I am already dedicating all my time to physics. I am sure that this will not get easier, but only more difficult.

There is marginal comfort in that Einstein himself was no academic god either.

Sometimes I feel like a rabbit in a cage, surrounded by remenants of other people’s bullshit shells, by forgotten paintchips that have weathered with a passing of meaning.

I am aware of my ongoing pride.

I feel as if my purpose here is greater than most others, that perhaps the existence I know is me-centric.

Pot, cigarettes, greed for pleasure, food, empty entertainment, idleness – these are my vices. They keep me in one place, and resist motion. The same laws that Newton found true for the physical world are present in my mind, in my “action”. My reaction is void.

I must find a way to conquer these temptations. I must consult God, though [while] my reasons and ends may not be unjust, [they are] certainly not pure or divine. My only advice comes from the Bible, for where else have I to turn?

It is logical to tackle the heaviest vice first, but from experience I know that cigarette-smoking is extremely hard to deny. The easiest, they? Perhaps achieving one small goal will boost my confidence towards the rest? Then this is my list:

1. Idleness (Laze)
2. Television (Pleasure of the Senses)
3. Pot (Pleasure of the Senses)
4. Cigarettes (Physical Dependance / Social Attachment)

I have been washed over and over by gentle waves of sun-sparkled water, time a stone sinking in a bottomless sea.
I am smooth, no surprises, no sharp edges to define me, I am uniform.
The jaggedness that once let me touch
is weathered away
slowly by droning dreams of submerged images,
distorted beneath ripples.
I look the same as my enemies and my friends, round and gray, dry and pale, in lieu of the washing of my origin.

Tell me what to feel.
Let me feel as they do.
I need to feel.

I have ascended, in a way, to join the billows of shade like me, of my own direction, of my own volition. I have been sold a system in which I can escape my form, and pretend to float above myself in foresight. I am young, fresh again, moist and senseless. But now I grow dark, pick up myself, and grind with the others. We grow electric in ourselves, and become loud with colossal motive.

Here I return, to the flat sands of my passive diagnosed condition. I am not my body or anything that I have thought; I am the walls around a person who I have learned to identify as myself: I am the condition; I am the virus. I am what has made me a hopeless hoper, a nomad in search of what cannot be found, I am the weight on a heart, I am the confusion of a mind, I am the trembling of a young hand, the butterfly that floats between stomachs, the salt that collects below eyes, the lilac that never swoons, that is never bought, that is never smelled. I wilt, the want, the need to be loved not fulfilled.

I watch as my friends in a strange white walled building, the world, mourn me.

I see my beloved, though she is unaware, mourn me. I see tears for me, I hear wails for me. I see coworkers gather around her to comfort.
I wander in and out of places, people seeing me but not. One woman sees me, but dismisses me as a figment of her head. My mother mourns, next to a body of water that seems out of place.

And slowly, I begin to become alive again, and I find my beloved. We embrace, longingly, and she fulfills my yearning with a kiss, unforced, according to her own decision.

I an instantly lost in a room of heart.

Even after I wake, I cannot leave the room of heart: It transcends my consciousness. I am in a room of heart, after a dream, after a feeling that has been touched ever so gently in a dream world. I yearn threefold now, tasting my reward, yet never having tasted it.

I know what it is to feel and have what I have never felt nor had.

I know longing bridges two realities.

A train, the train from where I have departed, or did the train depart from me? The train runs through the tracks on my brain. The train has come from Hamlet’s Denmark, and through to the Loman’s house. The train stops in the cellar, dark.

Another train, twin to my own, docks next door, in a familiar port, a port I walk through every day of my life. The port is disturbed as the train docks, unused for the most part, run down and barren. But thousands of faces spill out, roaming, humming, hovering.

From my train, also, faces spill. They speak to me with closed mouths, all at once, and I am undone. Calendars are broken by voices, alarm clocks feel pressed to run further out of reach.

Juice.

I am reminded of the hands that have traced faces. A cloth of man steps from the locomotive. I am watching lines spew from it, lines that have not been drawn, lines of which there can be only one with is true.

And then a charge runs through me, and I am not alone anymore. I know that he has felt what I have. The cloud has touched both of our clocks. The train has run through both of our light bulbs.

Smoke.