Mia Lasic-Ellis

I feel oddly still. Permanently going somewhere. Always alienated from somewhere else. I sit here on a large red cushion, whose tone casts itself boldly onto this scene. I have to get a rabies vaccine in 12 minutes. I don’t have enough time to do any of the things I need to do.

I could watch some YouTube.

Yet what will I gain from that? I know the answer is nothing. I’ve known the answer is nothing. My mind is placid enough to decide to do something, but not so placid to decide to do nothing. It is perhaps too early, and I am too buzzing in order to attend solely to my own thoughts.

Can you keep this up?

I don’t know. To persistently maintain such heightened states of consciousness, one must intricately join that bricolage of their life, patch any and all holes. If I seek to be a writer, or anything, I must work, perhaps not hard, but constantly, like breathing. That I sit here writing instead of sapping away mind to phone feels as good as a gift but also as unpredictable as one. All that has been good in my life seems to have happened by chance. Everything bad was for good reason.

Yet one becomes aware of their cycles. The question of absolution is the harder one, but the question of progress—am I doomed to suffering in the same ways in the same magnitudes?—has a simple answer. Yes. One becomes aware of their cycles, and it becomes that much harder to perpetuate them. There is no other way to get the things I want, to become the things I want to be, without working like a dog, like breathing. I will not write good articles in single days. I will not write fine stories in mere hours. I will not become who I wish to be in biannual intervals of happened-upon divinity. But that I know this now is perhaps proof of my success.

It seems that in these transitory periods it becomes hard to justify doing anything of worth, hard to choose to work on anything substantial because of “getting into the zone” or because somehow we suppose substantial will must be built and then exerted over substantial time in order to do anything worthy of substantiveness. But one can eke out good sentences in waiting rooms, on red cushions and train platforms. But good sentences do not write full lives, and good sentences written sparingly in transit certainly won’t suffice. I walk towards some place I will never reach, or I sit, stand, searching for something that glows with an otherworldly gold, a place, a thing, a self not real, eyes for something more. Whatever it is, I will not find it. I am forever fated to chase its dregs. Because my brain was wired some way.

But for now, I have been called up for my rabies shot.

Lionel Yu is a member of the Class of 2028.