The fabrication of a future

*Trigger warning, suggested suicide.*

*Tick Tock, Tick Tock, Tick Tock.*

I can hear my clock losing patience. The gears twist and turn around and around never indicating any time change. I'm creasing the edge of my papers, completely bewildered. I pull at my hair as my brain struggles to remember the date. I feel like a zombie. A zombie living the same notorious schedule.

My watch says hours pass, but for some reason I'm stuck in a world that ceases to exist. A world where going out with friends wasn't a death threat, and where students learned from teachers not computers. It's like I wake up with a feeling of boredom almost everyday. And the days I escape boredom are packed full of vain hope. Hope that the world I live in today, will somehow revert to its previous ways.

My eyes are sunken. My heart is swollen. I feel alone. All of my goals and dreams flew by me without ever giving me a chance to grasp them. A Thief broke into my life, and stole my future.

The question is no longer what will I do in 5 years, it is now how can I be sure there is a tomorrow. A pandemic has seeped its way into lives crevices and managed to alter the way we live. School is remote, masks are required, jobs are lost, homes are forsaken, lives are ended, depression is created. The child of this pandemic is death; a child I've practically babysat.

My mother's name was Eileen, she was forty-one. My Grandfather's name was Darian, he was sixty-eight. My cousin's names were Jeremy, Patty, Cleo, and Max, ages; 33, 26, 19, and 7. I could go on and on.

Death knows no age, no family, no state, no city, no limits.

Now everyday is a battle for me to overcome. A battle in my mind, in my career, and in my heart. I am an author, I've created and overcome many obstacles in the books I have written. But this obstacle seems harder to overcome. I cant write a way out of this situation. I can drag ink across my paper all I want, but my issues won't go away. 

Then what do I have left? If everyday is one endless day, what is my purpose. I am confined to my home, like every other person in this world. I spend my days carving my emotions into paper. I create fictional characters and live my life through them. Books are all I have left at this point. I am alone in a great big house, and somehow it's never quiet. My mind is constantly fluttering with thoughts of remorse and anxiety. 

What if this pandemic never ends. What if one day I wake up, and am faced with the reflection of a sixty year old woman? What then? My issue is that I see no change in time. Every minute and hour all prolapse into one giant depressive span of life.

Life seems surreal to me. How could such a well functioning, economically stable nation, utterly crumble? I am lost with the thought that maybe there will be no reconciliation. 

I measure my time by sleep, and light. When I'm tired I sleep, and when I wake, the light is different. I have no real way of knowing the time. My watch has stopped working many times, and when I fix it, I guess the hour. It's almost as if my life is a series of naps. It's like I'm the main character in a television show, and my schedule is run on a set that has artificial sunlight.

I have been able to cope with my desperate need for human contact by simulating a world full of companions. I write daily, actually it's all I do. I was an author before the pandemic. I started writing stories that I had planned on publishing when the world's gears started turning again. As time passed, as well as my mother, I was alone. My mind would run rampant with useless worries and thoughts, but none of them changed the situation I was in. I started fabricating stories about happy families, or walks in a green grassy meadow. My stories only got more elaborate, until I started living through my stories. I would create a character that I wanted to be, and I would live life through that character. I would clean my apartment, cook meals, go grocery shopping, have dinners with friends. I had unintentionally unlocked a power. I now had full control over the way I lived. 

I still write out my days, attend fictional events, and dinner parties. I make jokes to my artificial friends. I live in a world of my own words. I'm thankful that I'm able to write. It gives me security just knowing that I will always be safe in my books. I will always have someone with me, telling me everything will be okay. I can control anything I need to. I can be happy in my books. I can feel and experience love. I have a future. And although it may be an artificial future, it still exists in my mind. 

Sometimes I get more desperate, I feel like a loon. I am technically, but isn't everyone right now? I have been tempted to end everything, to meet my mother in heaven. I haven't tried and I won't, but it has come across my mind on more than one occasion. I know that is the weakness of mind toying with my emotions. I refuse to take that way out of this world.

I am aware that things may never return to the way they were, and I can't expect them to. But at this moment in time I need to live in the here and now. I need to come to terms with the fact that all normality was bitterly stripped from life. So i will continue to live my well thought out fictional life. 

I will portray myself in the words I write, and use ink to create my future.