Side project

What’s my side project? It’s the avoidance of meaningless pain. It’s the cultivation of meaningful pain. It’s the pursuit of overthinking. It’s like film photography, but I am the photographer, the instrument, the medium, the subject, the foreground, the background, the viewfinder, the viewer. I am the fire exploding in a corner, the frame, the texture of the printed paper. The single nail from which the photograph hangs. The peril of its life. The tenderness in its tilt toward the light.

How is that a side project? Oh. Shall I describe it differently? It’s the bilge pump while I’m taking on water. It’s the flicker of disobedience when I’m taking orders. It’s a survival project. What am I surviving? I’m surviving the decay of the spirit. I’m surviving the luxuries of Eden.

You purse your lips. You don’t approve. It takes a special kind of imprudence to gesture at the spiritual poverty of personal circumstance when living, objectively, in the richest set of rich circumstance. What sort of survival is required in my pink world, this place like a plastic prize inside a candy egg? If Paradise could be circumscribed, I would be the gargoyle in the citadel at its center. If arrogance were a palette of colors, I would be the most saturated shade of camellia red. I would ooze from the tube like possessed blood.

All true accusations. Truer than true.

But still I—a bottom feeder, a spoiled princess, a spoiled nectarine, a drop of goldenrod embedded in the liver of a shattered solar system—insist on the purifying potential of a side project. I say it’s necessary to keep me sane. I say it’s necessary to keep me alive. I say I fear that the corrosive power of my nine-to-five. Do you resent your job, you ask? No, I cherish the safety it provides. But, in searching for my adult identity, I come up against the meager hydra of my career history acting as my personal history, the rusty dagger of my job title as the only definition available and I—I do not wish to live my life as though it could be phrased within these terms.

You scoff. A life is not a thing to be phrased. Here, I relinquish any pretense of politeness. I can’t agree. We are sentences on a page, and some of us may find our ends in the form of a question. Don’t you—don’t you fear that? Isn’t it an ache able to contort your mind into an unrecognizable shape?

A grisly prism above the waters. Life as meaningless pain, then meaningful pain. There’s joy too, you say, but I am not listening. I’m caught in the gaps between the pain. I am angry, though I, eyes aflame, incorrectly perceive that anger as rapture. It feels good to be angry at the world. Set the lake on fire. Chemical reaction, trembling wave. Blue halo, orange wings. Then, quickly, feel the feeling shift again, into terrible terror. The terror heats my face with its approach and numbs my hands when it withdraws. I am not myself with or without it. Is there any kind of life I won’t regret? Is there any kind of side project that could save me or, at minimum, distract me from the state of all these pointed and polyethylene things? This longing is a thorn of juniper. I let it cut me, again and again. Uh-oh. I let it wear me like a crown.

I can hear the snap of the line—tension bursting the fibers of a red thread—from across the combined muscle of several oceans. I pull back the shattered cord and examine the point of breakage, where destiny did not diverge, but instead abdicated its throne entirely. I look at the torn stem and then at the petalled carpel, which smiles graciously, gratefully, not knowing time has made its call. If gardening were my side project, could I postpone the inevitable? Could I graft stem to stem, the ripped body to its withering prophet? Could I reattach head to torso, with needle and thread, my table littered with soil and newsprint? What would be the point?