My first week of college I went to the Cesar Chavez student center and found a box of free books on the ground. One of them immediately stood out to me because it concerned the theater of the absurd. I took the book, took it on our orientation trip to the lake, wore jeans, sat in a hammock and read the first chapter. I have since lost the book. I never read it again, just talked to a friend about it.
Kati died my third year of high school. Sometimes I feel like everything I write is about Kati dying, and it makes me wonder if anything else has ever happened to me. But her death is like a black hole. Slowly consuming all my thoughts until maybe one day I’ll fall in too.
My parents really love me. I can see it on their faces. I can feel it, too. I am the kind of person who loves people beyond my own capacity to, and I know I got that from them. My mom comes in and cries, tells me she misses me. Tells me I belong here. My dad says “You can’t change how other people feel, no matter how much you want to. No matter how much I want to” And I know he means he wishes he could have spared me a lifetime of sadness.
I could have spared myself a lifetime of sadness. If I ever really let go. If I stopped clinging onto the idea that maybe there is a purpose for me somewhere. That maybe someday something I make or do will feel good enough to make my life worth living, that maybe someone I love will love me an equal amount instead of so much they drown me or too late for it to matter or too cautiously to survive. But nothing is ever created or destroyed, sparing myself a lifetime of sadness only means distributing that pain on others.
And it gets heavier. The sadness is exponential. That’s why community is essential, but we’ve forgotten.
Kati posted something on instagram the day before she died, something that mentioned the theater of the absurd. Nothing particular, probably just a song lyric, but once someone is dead doesn’t it start to mean so much more?
I sat in a hammock at the beach and read because that is how I wanted to start college. I didn’t want to throw myself into the center of everything like I always have my entire life. I wanted to watch, I wanted the quiet, something different. I regretted wearing jeans to the beach because the lifeguard was cute but I. didn’t want my life to revolve around relationships anymore. I went to college wanting to find myself.
The theater of the absurd is a kind of collection of plays that follow in the footsteps of Albert Camus’s philosophy that life itself is absurd and devoid of purpose. The plays don’t have traceable plots, and they hinge less on the understanding of beginning-middle-end and more on something deeper, something we don’t have order or understanding for. Something I don’t even think we could name if we tried.
I got lost in it. Wanting a feeling blindly. Replaying the same songs, retracing the same steps, trying to recreate the magic. I got lost in wanting a life with purpose. Thinking too hard about what that would look like. It’s so easy when you have a friend, and you don’t realize how meaningless it is until you lose them. I kept finding purpose in other people and kept realizing other people find purpose in things. Other people find purpose in jobs and places and money and names and these tangible accomplishments that could be achieved, that they could make time for by setting me aside.
Tonight was the first time my mom actually referred to my girlfriend as my girlfriend. Telling me not to feel out of place, telling me I belong to them. Belonging is a strange word. It’s one sided, and really only you can decide who and what you belong to. But people forget that. They think they’re bound or obligated. They obscure reality to make it survivable while I keep drifting closer and closer to the black hole, overthinking myself into purposelessness, losing myself in the big picture.
We don’t have purpose, we’re just here. I’m still waiting for someone who knows that to meet me halfway.