Terror

He knew that he was wasting his time, surfing the internet, and looking at the Facebook pages and photographs of people he had never met, nor would ever meet. He had many more important things to do, like his graduate school applications, or reading for pleasure and intellectual development. But he liked doing this more; he felt as though he were learning a lot more by getting glimpses of humanity at its boring everyday, at birthdays, games, get-togethers, where people felt the need to record the memory of a fleeting moment for all time yet to come.

He was learning what it was like to be a human being. This was a lesson he felt he really needed to learn, since he'd lost touch with his own humanness along the way. It is puzzling that losing one's own humanity is possible. After all, in the Sanskrit verse, "humanness is what comes of being human, as cowness comes of being a cow." So how could he have ever lost it, his "ownmostness"? But such was the mystery that had crept into his mind of late. He didn't feel as though he were himself; he didn't feel as though he were anyone. He had become empty, an empty coffee cup at the diner, waiting to be filled by the pretty waitress who was really an actress.

What filled that cup more than anything was terror and fear. He had only seen this kind of terror in another person; he was much older, and by any measure someone who'd failed to make use of the opportunities given to him. But now he had begun to experience it himself. Terror because he didn't know where he was going; terror because there was nothing before his mind. This must be the feeling of convicts at the gallows or the chair, right before the trap door opened and the neck broke painfully, or right before the switch was flipped and one was fried in an oilless pan. It must also be the feeling of those set afloat on canoes in exile as they had nothing but a hostile crowd behind them and terrifying infinity and emptiness before them.

Terror. This is what defined his life now, a formless force.