Plastic Love

“I think I’m going insane,” I whisper to myself.

The world might as well not exist. Not at this moment. The world I see is pitch black, and there is no difference whether or not I keep my eyes closed or open. But I close them anyway, because I know that the darkness will eventually end.

I love riding the subway. I love riding a car. I love walking. I love traveling anywhere. Don’t get me wrong; I don’t actually like going to new locations. I simply like the feeling of not having anything to do.

See, if you’re sitting still in your room, you always have something productive you could be doing. You could be reading, studying, perhaps even making money while at your desk. But if you’re traveling, you have a marginal excuse to do nothing at all.

I mention this because this is one of those moments. I am on a subway train. But wait, don’t imagine any lights yet; we’re still not at the end of the tunnel. It’s still dark, and I’m still able to pretend that I don’t exist at the moment. You can’t yet see me. And I’m a bit glad, because I don’t think I’m very presentable at the moment.

Life’s been getting a bit rough recently. I don’t think it’s necessarily anyone’s fault that I feel this way, but I still don’t really understand how I should approach the problem.

Call me naive, but I think that the easiest way to solve any mental problem is to simply have a good friend. Even better, a good partner. That’s the funny part, though: our deepest, darkest issues are often mitigated by the presence of others—others who can easily dismiss you by saying, “No, I don’t want to help you.”

So it’s easier said than done, especially if you are a loner in life. And if you’re so deep in your own head that you genuinely start losing your capacity to interact with people, your well-being comes to depend entirely on your own internal decisions.

Oh, by the way, I think we’re out of the tunnel. The light is forcing its way through my eyelids, and I can feel the soft warmth of the sun on my neck.

But I don’t want to open my eyes. Not yet.

I had this fantasy when I was younger. I wanted to create a show that would begin just like this: we begin watching the darkness as a melancholic City Pop music plays in the background. The subway’s interior occasionally flickers from the lights built into the tunnel. Then as the beat drops, the Sun brings everything out of the dark and paints the windows orange. The protagonist is finally revealed. The scene continues with the protagonist eventually leaving the subway and beginning the show.

But right now, I don’t want to begin the show. I want to stay here a little longer doing nothing, being nothing.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want to die. But I don’t want to live, either. The closest concept to what I’m trying to convey is sleep. Sleeping is strange, in a way, because you remain living yet you also stop being conscious for a period of time. On paper, it should be like you’re skipping existence, like you’re time traveling, but it’s not. Your body knows by instinct how long you’ve been asleep; it loves sleeping despite not remembering a single thing. You are alive while you sleep, and that strange state of ephemeral existence, though it may be impossible to convey, is so delicious to me.

But I should open my eyes. If I keep this up, I’m accidentally going to end up at the end of the subway line. I silently pray that when I reopen my eyes, the world will offer me something a bit better than what it's given me so far.

So I finally open my eyes. I return to existence. I watch as the orange sky is sprayed onto the window across from me. The world seems to be the same, I seem to be the same, and yet, I face the world with a renewed yearning for things to be better this time around.

That's all I can do, really. I hold up my Christmas stockings to the world, watch it fill up, look inside and realize I’ve been given trash. Then I go get another stocking and hold it up to the world again in the exact same way. I guess I’m still a little boy who is waiting for his parents to get him the exact gift he wants. Maybe that’s why I was named Noel.

Now, I should get off soon. Maybe I’ll see you around. It was nice talking to you.