loop, infinite

I am, again, in Kansas City. I’m back in my apartment, sitting on the futon.

My laptop is a lever resting on the fulcrum that is my knee. As I type, it rocks to and fro. I can stabilize its motion if I push down with my wrists, but in doing so I feel a certain strain. My laptop is only made of plastic. If I’m not more careful, I could snap this thing in two.

So I’ll be more careful. I’ll straighten myself out on this futon. I’ll lean back a little more and pull the keyboard up until it’s just below crotch-level. I think that’s good enough.

It’s sunny outside. My blinds are closed now, but when I looked out the window just a few minutes ago the street was suffused with glare. Nothing was distinct. All I saw was one big, bright, blur. But it’ll only be like that for another hour. Then the sun’ll go down. It will be night. I will no longer need to squint.

And yet I don’t want that to happen. I’d like to hold the sun up there. Keep it where it is. I want to let today last just a little bit longer.

Of course, that’s impossible. The sun isn’t some cute yellow ball drifting through our sky. It’s the enormous, fiery star that has our planet trapped in its gravitational well; day and night happen only because Earth spins helplessly in place while tracing circles around the sun. Earth cannot escape. It has no choice, no agency.

Archimedes supposedly once said, “Give me a place to stand and rest my lever on, and I can move the Earth.” This is one of my dad’s favorite quotations. When I was a kid, he had a refrigerator magnet that had it printed on there, complete with a cartoon illustration of Archimedes and a lever and the Earth. (I don’t know where he got this magnet. I don’t think he has it anymore. It’s possible that I unconsciously made it up. I wouldn’t put that past me.)

“I can move the Earth.” This isn’t meant to be taken literally, and there’s a reason for that: if taken literally, the statement makes no sense. It’s patently false. Nobody can move the Earth. Not even with a lever. The Earth can’t even move itself. It is, and will always be, a slave to the sun.

So if even the very planet I live on is a victim of circumstance, then maybe that means I have to accept my fate. Wishful thinking isn’t going to get me anywhere. The sun will set soon. Night will, inevitably, fall.

At midnight, the month of May will disappear, and my “vacation” will vanish with it. I might as well accept what’s going to happen tomorrow: med school will return in full force. The respite will be over. I’ll be trapped again. Well, not quite; I should clarify. I was always trapped. The difference is, for the past two weeks I’ve been able to ignore that fact. Now I have to face it again.

The way I keep avoiding the long-term implications of this med school thing will be my eventual undoing. I let this go too far. I let it get out of control. I’m now in far enough that any attempt to escape will, I know, lead to financial and/or familial ruin.

All this time, I’ve been taking the path of least resistance, which has been to stay here. To stay sane, I have think about what I’m doing on a day-to-day basis, but nothing more.

Each day, when I get up, I ask myself: what do I need to do to survive these next twenty-four hours? And then I do whatever that is. Then I don’t think about the next day until night falls again and the next day is actually upon me.

I don’t want to face tomorrow because I know where tomorrow ends, where this whole enterprise eventually ends. It ends in a dead end. I have to blank all that out and compartmentalize myself. Do what needs to be done to get by, and that’s it. There is no lever.