Quitting

Every day lately, I wonder if I need to quit caffeine. Every day, I feel one cup shy of a nervous breakdown, like the tiniest overpour might overwhelm my fragments of peace of mind. I'm not even clear why: the normal pressures that make up my life—the job worries and the art angst, the money shortages, the girl troubles, the social anxieties—these are so common to me by now that it'd be wrong to call them stressors upon my life: more accurately, they are my life. 

In fact, I've come to realize: the things that I sometimes think of as "stressors" are exactly the things that I choose for myself, to keep my life from becoming mind-numbingly boring. If I really had the peaceful life that I sometimes pretend to want, then I'd almost certainly have to hang myself. Or, more accurately, I'd commit the smaller suicides that have become the recurring themes of my life's history: I'd change my city, quit my job, end my relationship, neglect my bills, drive out of town, write poems, kin with nature, and then come back—tanned and kissed by freedom, and safely now distant from the stability I, in equal parts, crave and dread.

Is life this complicated for other people?, I sometimes wonder: the consternations, perplexations, machinations, the planning and replanning, so much systematic constructing and deconstructing and destructing. Maybe it is.

[Is life this complicated for ants? Maybe it is.]

And while my pot of coffee is brewing, I realize, too: the only way that I've learned to get by in the world is not to live in it, but rather to live parallel, beside it, at arm's length, able to pluck and reach from its passing conveyer belt like it's a cafeteria, but being sure not to getting caught up in it, tangled and dragged, and certainly being sure to avoid stepping on.