To varying degrees I am alive and dead.

This existence is neither good nor bad. 

It just is. So much to do with luck, defining all things.

Yes. 

I believe only in chaos. It is our overlaid patterns 

patterning the absence of patterns, 

to make it grass, something it could almost be. 

It takes all the beauty out of it. 

You say, people are project pursuers. 

That implies existence is an action, 

a constant set of actions, a set of results from choices. 

This creates our identity. Over the course of our lives. 

I can’t believe that. 

I’ve tried. 

And neither can I give you a plausible alternative. 

I can destroy, but I cannot build. 

So, I’ll go on, like you, because I don’t know how to do anything else. 

No.

I don’t know how to be anything else. Other than to be doing.

Until Death. 

I’m in no rush to get there. Like all things, it’ll surely disappoint.

But I know that behind all these projects, I am. 

Beneath these ambitions, beneath the drive for friendship, security, food, and all its abstractions thereof; I exist. 

I was here. I am here. A fragment in this chaos that is my only god. 

All these projects and goals on top of this empty skeleton, filled with only air and water, and all their abstractions thereof; 

I was.

When I was born. 

I will be. 

When I die. 

Perhaps the only continuous element throughout is my amorphous shell. 

But it does not matter; who I am doesn’t need to be continuous. 

I have nothing to prove. 

I have all the proof I need, right here, right now; I am. 

And this world wants to give me purpose. 

So I will take it. 

There’s no reason not to, and the best of all reasons to do so:

Everyone else is doing it.

So I’ll walk off that cliff like the rest of them. 

Because I might as well. 

I don’t know how to be anything different. 

I don’t know how to be without doing. And purpose

makes the doing easier. 

But sometimes, even still

this horrible thing happens where I lose all perspective. 

And it’s like I’m right back, rejecting everything

I’ve learned. Fighting back

against the chaos. 

As if I could avoid it.

As if I could outdo it. 

As if with all my mental effort I could fashion it

into something I could more easily ingest. 

And I can’t. 

So I bang my fists against the wall. And I scream.

And I claw desperately into the skin of the people I love,

if only to pull their eyes by the socket

down

to my intractable problem. Look! 

Look at this puzzle! You must

solve this puzzle! 

If it’s a puzzle, then it has a solution. Look! 

Look and help me find it!

And their eyes drip with blood

from my fingernails, they are only

angry. 

Now they are bleeding, and there’s still no solution. 

I have to fight. Hard. Against that need

to pull them down to my imagined puzzle�"

Just another device to parse pattern on the chaos.

I’m getting better,

but the fight sometimes gets the better of me, and

to varying degrees,

I fail. 

And the thought in either case returns: Death

is better than not having the answer. 

At least death is a certain act. An end to uncertainty, 

to a life of 

“I don’t know.” 

And I imagine my feet swinging in the air, 

and a relief sweeps over me. 

For it is the uncertainty that I cannot bear. 

And I imagine the knot

at the back of the neck.

breaking

the spine

with a single drop. 

And I imagine the loose rope

snap

tight

like order. 

But then disappointment and surprise washes over me. 

I’ve come so far. 

In accepting the meaninglessness and the chaos. 

Even still, when the tunnel vision returns,

it wins.

I can’t rationalize my way out of it. 

I don’t know what to do about this. 

Except praise the chaos that brought me the good luck

not to ever have done it. 

Because certain it may be.

But a solution to the unsolvable puzzle of chaos it is not. 

I’m not ready to die because I am

not yet one with the chaos. I have

not yet accepted it. 

It would be but an escape. 

And that is my project.

Because I am a pursuer of projects.

Because that is all I know how to be.

I can be no different. And maybe

that’s the only thing holding me back from Death;

the project to accept life. 

To varying degrees, I succeed.