The Dread of Existential Dread

As weird as humans are as species, I think the weirdest thing they do is exist. You go about doing mundane little things, in a routine and monotonous sequence of existence. Nothing in your life ever changes as you experience them, of course other than an occasional good news or a bad one, like the death of your childhood dog. But you get over it too, and you continue to exist. Maybe on a particularly gloomy day, you decide to clean your shelf and you come across a book that you haven’t read since sixth grade and it all comes back.

You realise that the place where you buried your beloved pet once, is a parking lot now and you don’t even remember the exact spot of his burial, even though once in a very brief moment of time,your knees were caked with the dirt of that ground and your tears ran almost viscous. Your best friend brought you a DVD of your favourite movie to cheer you up. Remember them? You promised each other that you would never drift apart like best friends often do, but you don’t even remember their last name anymore. Or the way they thought the concept of having a last name was inherently stupid. You live the same day everyday, but when you sit down and think, nothing’s been the same.

So existence is stupid, just the way the existential dread after being head butted by nostalgia is stupid. You spend the rest of the gloomy day looking up your best friend on Facebook, oh they got married last year ! oh, you weren’t invited. They don’t care, they don’t. And do you? You scroll down and down. Wait, they survived cancer?! You never reached out because you never knew and they never needed your help. That kind of hurts. So you tuck away that memory and wake up the next day, with your bed sheet swimming in sunlight and you snooze your alarm four precise times like you always do. Your breakfast cereal is soggy by the time you spoon it into your mouth, like always and when you see that your regular seat is left empty in the bus, you smile because having the same thing and doing the same thing, makes you feel the same thing : safe. So, live and exist and live and exist, until the next gloomy day appears and you pretend it doesn’t because it’s easier to exist when you forget about your existence. And isn’t that weird?