Week 37: Inevitable

Lately I've been thinking about how so much of my life feels sorta pre-lived for me. Roommates, leafy campus, classes, essays and ramen noodles at 1 am - aren't I just following a beaten track? This rite of passage is so uniform and well-documented that sometimes I feel as though I could do it in my sleep. (Sometimes I wish I could do it in my sleep, but that's another story all together.)

It's not that I hate it, not at all - like any sort of life, the ups and the downs generally balance out somewhere around okay. The grass over the fence is greener, but then it always will be.

And I know this is just a waiting room, a holding pen before the bigger and better and brighter things but what if bigger is just a bigger room? What if that future is also a path that has been beaten by so many before me that it's no longer anything but dirt, no longer anything alive or green?

At least three times every day I feel a sense of deja-vu - recognizing that my day-to-day is just a montage from a college movie and the only thing I'm missing is the soundtrack and the jumpcuts. You know in those dreams when you somehow know that the door is going to open, an infinitesimal second before it does - that it's inevitable? When your life is pre-lived, everything you do, no matter what, is inevitable. It's a product of your stress or your hormones or your environment or your upbringing or it's just the next step on the ladder to success but no matter what it's inevitable. It's been done before and will be done again. Don't believe me? Check the internet, because a million people think every post is 'so relateable'.

So much is made of this time of life, but I'm not sure that I'll be able to make anything with these cookie-cutter memories. Graduation pictures taken in a uniform - under a uniform tree and a uniform sky, by a uniformed dude to be put in uniform frames? There is something so sterile about that. And we hold this up as such an achievement, as if we have climbed a mountain or built a house, as if we've done something other than traipse down the path beaten so smooth for us by generations and movies just to put on the same robes and toss the same cap in the air.

It's not that anything's the matter; it's just that everything is the same.

Goodnight, bloglings