Ripe

Maybe there must always be two of us—our real selves and the ones we create to survive in the world as it is.

When you're young, every part of life seems big and monumental. Once older you can see it for what it is: smaller pieces of a larger game you have no choice but to play.

How does anyone bear themselves? How can anyone stare into the darkest corners of humanity and return to the office, enter the meeting room, and deliver the presentation? How do we all just keep working?

Doesn't it overwhelm you sometimes -- To be alive? Don't you sometimes feel like at any moment you could be torn away from yourself? From your life?

The amount of pain we can endure is spectacular. We are conditioned to withstand torture, to haul gray boulders of hurt on our shoulders, to confront the pressure endlessly, the heavy rough stone wearing away at us until our skin breaks open, revealing the bloody red flesh below.

My mind can make love out of anything, even the smallest of shards.

I have no control over the world around me, or the people around me, or how they regard me, or how they speak to me.

The future is as cold and alien as the terrain of a newly discovered planet. Isn’t that the beauty of the future? If you push forward, if you aren’t too afraid, if you step into your space suit and enter the darkness, you will discover new and terrible worlds.

If the brain is elastic and memory is faulty, maybe all of these stories are wrong. Maybe it happened a different way altogether. Maybe I was happy and I just forget that now.

You wake up one day and realise what you've become, what you allow, and you have to stare down into the pit at yourself, at your own choices, at the ways in which you have been cunning and stupid and false and wretched to keep up with the world around you.

I have known sadness my entire life. I recognized the message: I would never have anything, not in a real way. The best I could do was the discount version.

We make them familiar in order to understand them, to reduce our fear of what is beyond this life. There is safety in metaphors. The truth is far more terrifying:

A single choice made with the best intentions can become a terrible life. Imagine biting into a seemingly ripe fruit, only to find your mouth filled with rot.

Our bodies have been split down the center, our guts spilled across the conference room table. And for what?

My mother stung and stung. Her words stung. Her fury stung. Her palm stung across my skin. Some part of love must be the stinging. After enough of the red welts, you start to change. Eventually, you begin to hide. You stay in your room, quiet. Eventually, after enough stings, you learn to avoid the wasp altogether. Eventually, you grow up and move as far away as you can. You might even put an entire country between yourself and the wasp queen.

Everyone struggles at first. I mean, I didn’t, but technology comes naturally to me. I was born with a brain for it. I think most men are.’ ‘I don’t think that’s how it works. Anyone can develop a skill. You don’t need to be born with anything.

Some days, of course, you’re out there digging ditches. Some days, it’s just a Tuesday, you know? But then there are the big moments. And you have to save them in your heart, crystallize them, and put them in a glass jar.

Here are the facts: I am thirty-three, almost a year into a job in Silicon Valley, waiting for the truth of my life to crack open and reveal itself.

I don’t know what you’re getting at. You’re too attached to your own feelings. Life isn’t so complicated as you make it for yourself.

Isn't that always the way adult life begins? You think you'll become something different, something new. At first, you swim violently against the tide, your body straining until your muscles give out, until you can't push any harder, until you stop fighting and float, letting the water take you back to shore, where the rest of the world is already at the office, typing on their computers beneath fluorescent lights, toiling away in the glare of permanent productive daylight.

Life splits like a snake's tongue. The two paths fork before me. Is this all life is? One choice followed by another, stacking upon themselves, until you are standing in your own future and you have become someone else?

You wake up one day and realize what you’ve become, what you allow, and you have to stare down into the pit at yourself, at your own choices, at the ways in which you have been cunning and stupid and false and wretched to keep up with the world around you. How does anyone bear themselves? How can anyone stare into the darkest corners of humanity and return to the office, enter the meeting room, and deliver the presentation? How do we all just keep working?

We detach our faces from our phones and rise up when the train reaches a certain station. We spill out onto the sidewalk of a wealthy town overrun with the headquarters of every major tech company. The streets are lined with palm trees and boutiques, but even here, blanketed bodies dot the doorways.

They keep talking: new succulents, hot yoga class, stock options, making their own kombucha and yogurt. Usually I would sit in sullen rage and spend the night shooting eye daggers across the table at them. But in the drugged country of my newly softened heart, I can graciously accept their lives.

My father says that capitalism is a chess match. We are only playing the same game of chess until we aren’t, until the paychecks stop.

For a moment, just a moment, the man on fire is gone and there is nothing in my mind at all. For a moment, I am cold, still, a cadaver on a silver autopsy table.

Their white plastic earbuds override the sound of real life, their faces buried in their screens. They do not speak or make eye contact. They aren’t really here. The train is full of husks.

I remember the words of a physicist: Anything that can happen will happen. What we resist the most is eventually what must befall us. What we fight eventually becomes our future.

Life is a series of big moments," he said. "Some days, of course, you're out there digging ditches. Some days, it's just a Tuesday, you know? But then there are the big moments. And you have to save them in your heart, crystallize them, and put them in a glass jar.

Here, I am surrounded by all of the signs of money crushing the life out of a place: the rich live inside tall town homes, the poor live in faded dirty tents if they are lucky, there are boarded-up businesses next to new juice bars, people either defecating in the streets or buying gourmet groceries, eating at overpriced restaurants or out of the dumpsters in the back alley. It’s a city of extremes.