prose: than life

She walks, snow crunching under the light pressure of her leaky boots, and thinks about nothing. Rather, she thinks about nothingness, about absorption into the rocks and atmosphere and essence. Not too long before she decided to take this first-snowfall walk, a boy had explained it all to her, in the aftermath of sweet smoke. He delineated the beauty of the thing: giving up on self, becoming everything by being nothing. Every time she wakes up, it means she has not achieved Nirvana, it means she has not yet figured out how to transcend her own petty thoughts, her own avaricious desires, her own being, and always being larger or smaller than life, never just the right size.
She tries to find the way to oblivion, and if not oblivion, then meaning. She tries through scattered praying to disorganized ikons; through the slowing-down of breathing and thoughts in meditation; through the muddle of drunkenness; through the heady clarity of marijuana; through skin-on-skin touching in the dark of strange houses and in the absence of plans.
Nothing gets her any closer to being nothing; at least, not for long. Every time she falls to the bottom of an experience, touches the truth of the moment, another rotted wooden floorboard of reality splinters. She finds temporary loopholes, transient respite from the restlessness pervading her days: Being alone at night in the labyrinth of concrete city houses; rushes of a boy’s breath against the backdrop of slowly-winding music; blood running to her head as she loses track of herself, being so minute in her universe. The relief from realization comes in bursts, but the crash is harder than the fall. She always comes back to herself, in the end, a goddamn modern-day Siddhartha.
Icicles of winter air stab her lungs as she walks faster, faster towards no particular destination. The pain in her chest reminds her that she is yet living. Even though they are contrary to what she most wants, she loves these moments, too, the ones where she feels most in touch with flesh and fresh air. She’s due at the job she hates in mere minutes, and she knows that she won’t be there much longer. She has a paper due the next morning, and she knows that she wants it to count this time. She has a new obsession, and she knows that it will only serve to get her further away from ataraxy, that dropping of desires she most desires.
She wants to disappear, dissipate into the polluted Hudson, evaporate into the dirty city air. She knows that she will quest for truth in mistaken places until she stumbles out of being. It is enough for her, for now, however, just to exist in the snow, her feet cold in thin boots, music tinny in her ears and snow chill against her face. It is enough to be no larger and no smaller than life.