Entwined in This Infinity

24. Autumn - Xena

After living life fast, messy, and reckless ever since you learned the definition of rebellion, you had assumed you would rocket through the rest of your days with the same fire you possessed when you were twenty.

If you had known those emotions were a limited supply, you would’ve repressed yourself into a good little robot willing to serve and cringed through years of school and work and bullshit relationships. You would have held onto the hope that your light at the end of the tunnel would come. You would have played it smart.

Too late for that. This world has no room for second chances, and time and time again you have proven that first chances are wasted on you.

Which leaves you here, lying in the sun under a tree of dead brown leaves, eyes dull.

Today, it’s “How did picture books and cartoons ever get the misconception most trees have red and orange and yellow leaves in autumn? Is brown too depressing for them?” and “Clouds should look more realistic and less painting-like.” Today, someone on the street was hit by a car on the crosswalk, and as people crowded around him attempting to find out if he was alright, you stepped over him, because he was in your path. Today, you read a headline for some mundane tragedy in the Middle East and for an hour or two floated in the thought of what might have become of you had not rejected the hijab when you learned the definition of rebellion. Would you have faced more blatant racism? Would you care more about the struggle of Muslims?

Probably. Probably not.

The founding principle of your impassive state is “underwhelming.” You have become the true neutral. With no ability to call upon “happiness” and “sorrow” and “anger,” the basis of your previous personality, there’s nothing you can do to prevent yourself from falling into apathy and watching the remnants of who you were slip through your fingers.

You wish you could care enough to wish you could feel wistful so you could wish that you regretted that personality’s absence. Thinking of emotions tends to be a convoluted process of several layers that makes little sense when assessed as a whole or cobbled together into a sentence. You wish you could care enough to wish that it could be simpler.

Which leaves you lying underneath a dying tree, knowing with the numbness of an objective observer that it had to be you. You had and always will be the freak. It is your destiny.

What will happen when there’s an end to indifference, too?