For the past three years, every new year, I have one particularly rough night wherein I reflect deeply on the fact I am going to die.

And not just die, but irreparably warp into a new person. Every day. Every minute. And I can’t stop myself from melting into someone new — no matter how much I might want to.

It took longer this year, but all roads lead to this one night.

And that’s tonight. For me at least.

Tomorrow.

It’s hard to know what to say.

Talking about things helps me think them through and it helps me feel better.

But I just want to write what I did a year ago, or more like thirteen months, when I was slumped against the brick wall of my dorm room  — crying. 

I don’t know how to communicate to the people I love just how deeply this affection goes. One day they won’t be here anymore and all I’ll have are fragments of memory.

Well, it’s been over a year, and now my grandmother and my dog are gone.

I don’t know how I’m going to be able to live when I wake up one day and it’s my mom or my dad as well. 

There’s such an overwhelming sadness to that feeling that I simply cannot communicate.

I wish I knew how.

Not that it would change anything, but maybe I’d at least feel like I could show people what it’s like to be me — at least me right now. Express why I care, or how deep it goes.

I know everyone feels like this, sometimes, but I don’t think most people feel it the way I do.

Never.

So, as it turns out, I have some sort of disposition to dissociate.

With the benefit of hindsight, this explains some things.

It’s also remarkably stupid that it took me so long to learn that my brain was randomly causing this to happen. But, thankfully, I spent a lot of time last year dissociated. Eventually I put the pieces together and figured out why going to museums as a kid had such a distinctly weird feeling.

And, to be clear, it’s not always bad to dissociate, I think.

There’s a kind of magic to getting lost in another world. But you don’t want the world you’re getting lost in to be your bedroom, or your own mind.

Comes.

We could psychoanalyze me.

Why do I fret so much about change? About losing people?

Because I feel cosmically alone when I’m like this. Because I intently understand the transience of this moment and my own personality.

Because I feel like an outsider. An observer. Not really here anymore. Not really real.

And sure, none of that stuff helps. But I don’t think it’s the main reason.

Dissociation is like your mind and your body shutting down — except nothing actually is.

Physical sensation stops getting passed through and subsections of the brain stop reporting information to your consciousness. 

The result is that I’ll take my coat off in the middle of a winter night, because I can’t feel the cold, and that mundane objects become fantastical, because the concept association part of my brain no longer respects the conscious part of me.

But everything still works the same, even if you can’t feel it. I still move and respond the same, even if I can’t understand it.

So I need to be careful not to give myself a cold, even though I can’t feel any right now. 

Tomorrow.

I think there’s something wrong with me.

I mean actually we’ve identified one of the problems — the issue is solving it.

And it’s not like this is impacting my ability to live life. It’s not like I fail to show up to class or eat dinner because I’m too dissociated.

It’s not like I perform worse on tasks, at least none of the ones I’ve been doing, when I’m like this.

I don’t even think it’s noticeable, unless I told you. 

This makes things weird — though in fairness that is always how things are with me. Even when I’m in normal states I think my head is a chaotic place. It’s just strange to be me, no matter what’s going on.

But it does make things weird to watch your body move on its own, and know you’re just a passenger to your own life.

It’s weird to see yourself respond as you always have, to watch yourself move as you normally do, and to have your consciousness drowned in murk as it happens. 

To view reality through a window. Outside space and time.

It’s weird to understand that no one has any actual control. That we’re just physical systems responding to stimuli, all in perfectly predictable ways. 

It is weird to go outside and not feel the cold. To not understand why the street you live on doesn’t look familiar anymore.

It’s all just very strange. Even now.

Never.

There’s a silence that comes with these experiences. An aloneness.

I’m not connected to anything or anyone — not even myself.

But in the stillness and the silence, and the absence of concepts or mental clutter, there is just one thing. 

It’s not always the same thing, of course.

It’s like getting to view a tree or a street lamp for the first time. To see only that thing. To feel fully the concept that goes alongside that cluster of molecules.

And so the world becomes overwhelmingly beautiful. 

I’m not sure if everyone else can see things like this, and the fact I do seems to cause me a not-insignificant amount of strife — but I do wish I could show other people the way I see things, at least some times.

Comes.

There’s the world above ours. One of silence and meaninglessness — not because of any profound or existential nihilism, not because of some grand point about the universe.

It’s just that the world is silent and still, because motion and motivation only make sense with regards to a referent; There’s no true point of reference for reality, and the total amount of matter and energy is remaining unchanged. It’s still.

So I’m not trying to make a grand existential point.

I just wish other people could sometimes understand what the world looks like. At least what it looks like when you peel back some of the layers. What it looks like to me, right now, today.

And then I wish I could show you how beautiful everything is.

And that makes me want to cry.

Tomorrow.

I just broke down crying as I was walking home.

I don’t usually break down crying — except for unexpected break-ups, which somehow has also been all of them.

But here I am.

And I want to say I don’t know why.

But that wouldn’t be true. I’m crying because we’re all going to die, and one day none of us will see each other again — and that’s just too much for me right now.

Never.

I feel things intensely.

Sometimes I wonder if this is weakness, but passion and excitement aren’t bad things.

Things just feel intense to me, whatever they are.

And right now I’m in a state where my brain will only provide me with a few pieces of sensation or a few concepts to work with. Everything else gets filtered out, relegated to the background.

So I am intensely feeling the fact that I care about things. About the people in my life.

And these feelings are outstripping my ability to act, to communicate.

I’m only here for a moment, and then someone else takes my place.

I’m stuck with all the memories of the people whose lives I’ve taken over. 

Soon someone else will have my memories.

The memory of this moment.

And in this moment I’m barely even here. Everything is staggered and still, and the distinction between instances of time has become jagged, instead of the smooth transition our brains typically bless us with.

So deeply I understand that each moment of our lives is fleeting. 

And I don’t know how to communicate that to you in a way that you can understand. I’m not that good a writer.

So deeply I feel overwhelmed by the truth in front of me, and I don’t know how to tell anyone else that.

Comes.

I’m overwhelmed by the fact I got to live this life.

These moments were valuable. They were beautiful and I want them to be mine forever.

I think I have lived an almost entirely unremarkable life. But it was my life. I loved these seconds I got and the people who shared it with me.

Overwhelmingly so, the times I got to sit on the couch with my family or chat over the phone with friends were delightful to me. I don’t yearn for some grand adventure or some luxurious party — I just want to live alongside the people I care about.

I don’t know how to communicate that the day to day of my life is what I want most. I don’t know what more I could want, or need, than a bit more time with those who are important to me.

I just want another tomorrow with you all.

Tomorrow.

One year ago, or more like thirteen months, I was in a basement dorm room, under my covers, crying, as the cold of the outside seeped its way into me through the brickwork of my wall. 

I blinked and I woke up today. Here in the future.

It’s so strange to fully and completely understand what was happening to me in that moment.

I didn’t think I ever would again, I think.

But I thought wrong — this is exactly the way I felt a year ago. I haven’t felt that way since, but I feel it right now.

The texture is identical, and I wish, again, I knew how to communicate that. 

But I don’t.

Never.

I don’t know what I am anymore.

I thought this might stop happening to me, but it hasn’t.

I thought I might feel okay again one day, but I don’t.

Because I’m just me. This one single second. And then I’m someone else.

I don’t know how to handle the fact properly. Because day to day, most days, I’m mostly fine. Even though the last year has been more stressful than normal, and even though I don’t yet have a real job, I’m mostly fine most of the time.

Actually I’m probably vaguely happy most of the time, at least. Most of the time I get to use the internet or talk with people, so it’s hard not to be at least a little happy.

But I’m not talking with other people right now. I’m not watching a YouTube video.

I’m here.

Tomorrow I’ll do those things, but it’s not tomorrow.

And it won’t be me.

So intensely do I feel the finality of my existence, and the inescapable fact that because something like me exists, sometimes, someone is going to have to feel what I’m feeling right now.

By being alive, the system that is me condemns one person, once a year, to this.

Tomorrow someone is going to fix the spelling of sentences I typed on my phone, and tomorrow someone will copy these sentences onto my blog.

But I won’t be here tomorrow. 

No number of exclamation marks can convey that fact properly.

I won’t be here tomorrow. Someone else will. 

Comes.

I just want to see the people I love. I just want to be okay.

Tomorrow.

The problem, I’m realizing, after three delightful years of this tradition, is that I am mostly okay.

I have a home and people who care about me. I was lucky, and so I’m smart and charming. I have food and I have more wealth than almost every human who has ever lived.

Most of the time I’m on Twitter, or watching a movie with my parents, or chatting with friends. 

The issue is that someone else is doing those things, and not me.

If 99.99% of the time I am perfectly fine, it doesn’t change the sheer overwhelmingness of being like this right now.

It’s so strange and I don’t have the words left tonight to explain just why every thing conspires against a feeling of normalcy when I’m like this.

And that sucks — for me at least.

Because tomorrow someone else will be okay. But I won’t get to see that tomorrow.

Never.

I think I take a little pride in the way my mind works.

It’s confusing and there’s all these tangents, but usually it all relates back to itself in the end.

Sometimes I’ll talk for five minutes straight, and then my friend will point out that I’ve done this. And that somehow, miraculously, it did all make mostly sense in the end.

I don’t know if I pulled that off tonight.

Tonight I just want to pull a blanket over myself and cry. I don’t know how to live life properly, and I keep living my life in spite of this. My brain fundamentally refuses to work normally and yet I keep going about a very normal existence.

I can’t accept that things will change and that I’ll die.

I can’t accept that some things are lost to me forever. I can’t accept that my grandmother is dead. That there’s a different dog sleeping in our gray chair.

I can’t accept that tomorrow isn’t coming for me tomorrow.

I refuse.

And that refusal won’t stop anything. I’m going to fall asleep eventually.

But still I do.

Comes.

It’s hard to communicate the futility of using language, which is of course a byproduct of the problem I’m failing to explain.

I realize that when you read what I’ve written it won’t really make sense — or it won’t make the sense I want it to.

I can say that I care deeply, but that sentence isn’t expressing properly what I feel like to care so deeply you burst into tears.

Sometimes inside my head I’m exploding, and sometimes my brain is staggering conscious experience and preventing me from feeling the cold, or recognizing familiar shapes, and on the outside it looks the same either way. Whether or not I understand what my reflection really looks like has no bearing on whether or not you recognize me.

And what I feel has no impact on what these words mean to you.

And so I just can’t capture what I’m feeling tonight, even though I’m really trying.

Tomorrow.

I don’t know how everyone else can function when this is the world we live in; though I suppose I’m still functioning.

The way light dances, actually dances — spins in circles across a doorframe or reflects off the moon — or the way vines crawl alongside the paneling of a house — reaching up for the stars, just like humanity has. The way vapor and atmospheric pressure form a crucible, that chaos theory then forges once in a lifetime celestial shapes with.

One day I woke up and found that everything was still, and that everything vibrated with hidden beauty. Every day I go outside and I am washed away by that absurd beauty everyone else is nonchalantly walking past.

Never.

I don’t know how everyone else can make it through their day without breaking down, without crying; though I suppose most days I don’t either. 

One day I’ll have to say goodbye to everything I’ve ever loved. Or someone will have to say goodbye to me.

Think about that fact. Actually think about it, because I don’t have the words to properly capture what actually reflecting on this should feel like to you. But it’s a horrific truth. 

“How do you live with that?” ask the man who continues to live, whether or not he actually can stomach that truth.

I can’t bear to say goodbye. Not to this world. Not to the beauty before us. And not to the people I care about. 

Maybe the real question is how I only have a breakdown over this once a year.

Comes.

What’s the real cause of this then? Why do I feel like this sometimes?

I dismissed the easy answer, so there must be another. 

If the cause isn’t this sense of cosmic aloneness, if the cause isn’t how empty the world looks right now — how still it all is — what is the main thing causing all of this? Because it’s a pretty intense thing to be experiencing, whatever the reason for it is. 

I think it’s love. I think that’s the explanation. 

Being like this makes everything more intense — or more aptly the few things I am left with more intense, which is saying a lot given my baseline levels of intensity. And right now those things I’m experiencing are affection for the important people in my life and recollection of the moments we shared.

Right now my brain is placing no limit on how deeply it will let me feel that affection. 

And why should it?

I don’t think the issue here is that I’m feeling like this. I think the issue is that I’m not at home, I’m not with those people. It’s late at night and everyone is asleep. Friends on different continents are disconnected from my life and the people who are dead now are forever trapped in the past.

And that’s just sad.

And so I’m crying.

It’s not some maladaptive existential loneliness that makes me like this. It’s just me experiencing the appropriate affection, the appropriate reaction, to the cosmic circumstances I find myself in. It’s just me properly reacting to the fact everyone will be dead one day.

And it is in fact made worse by being dissociated. Because even though I know tomorrow someone like me will see these people, and even though I know I will continue to spectacularly fail to communicate my affection, I am also deeply aware of the fact that for me 

Tomorrow Never Comes.