Stumbling Through

         That his friends couldn’t make it, is a lie. It activates as a part of his entire automated system of self-deception. Yet, tonight, neither the lie nor the reason behind it bothers him.

        The crowd outside the movie theater teems with excitement. A security guard whirls around  near him and jokes about the dangers of crossing a 60 seat wide row mid-movie. In front of him, a guy googles the number of after credit scenes, while another cautions him about spoilers. The girl behind bumps into him and apologizes, but all he can muster is a detached smile. These events unfold only after being folded, and it’s the folding that he looks for.

        As the line snakes around back to the entrance and wiggles in anticipation, he considers how everything is weaving together subconsciously, how the man and his baby are one agnosia away from being amoeba, and how the pillar that reaches up into the sky only does so because of his extremely subtle taste for depth. The line moves and every shiver strokes his imagination.

         The crowd funnels in through the doors where the Imax draws him in. By the time the Dolby Digital sound signature plays, his way of seeing the world as its own film has all but faded. He feels it linger only as a projection of the outer projection, which loses a little more ground every time she graces the screen. Soon, he’s entrenched in the flowing 24 frames per second.

        When the movie ends, he hankers for cheese and grease. The pizza beggar wanders from pizza place to pizza place until he finds a shop where his classmates grind it out at 1 a.m. He does his best to pretend not to recognize the cashier, takes a small cheese to go, heads back to his dorm, and tears into the pizza as if he isn’t already bloated. Fortunately, the euphoria drowns out any regret. He sighs and decides that he can’t postpone his Finals essays any longer.

         After scrupulously wiping the grease from his hands, he searches the Internet for a summary of Kant. Google primes him enough for him to feel comfortable in bed for the night, except no such comfort comes; caffeine tirelessly romps about his system. He lays in bed and stares up at the blinking smoke detector. Did Kant drink coffee? And if he did, was he addicted to it--rolling out of bed thinking about the straight black before anything noumenal, quietly cursing himself because he drank too much and couldn’t philosophize without pounding his desk every five minutes?

        He wanders over to the school library, feeling guilty for some crime he didn’t commit, or, maybe just the crime of walking outside at such an antisocial hour. After the relentlessly cheery security guard checks his ID upon arriving, he makes his way to a computer to type some of his essay. Sitting down at a workspace, he balks at the task, and considers again how he’s putting this all together--the totality of his experience--but nothing wondrous comes. Several hours pass, and he swears off caffeine twice before falling asleep at 6 a.m.

         When he awakes at 11, he doesn’t immediately focus on his essays that are due at midnight. His mom and dad are coming to pick up some stuff and had asked him to have things ready when they arrived, so he gets things ready, and then talks himself into a character popular with his parents who’s generally known as having his shit together.

        His parents come, they stuff their car and their bellies, and despite a recurring concern for what he’s been using since he’d run out of toilet paper, he thinks he portrays himself well as someone who hasn’t totally lost their shit.

         They don’t stay long, and in the early afternoon, he takes a nap but wakes up longing for another nap or five. He eats a dark chocolate bar in hope of a Finals boost in the clutch. Nothing; the brand must’ve had a low cocoa percentage. He resorts to drinking a second cup of coffee at 6 p.m. even at the cost of more sleep deprivation, but when he sits down to write his essays, the questions feel like butter to his brain.

         The third cup of coffee gives him something. It isn’t exactly alertness or intelligence, more like the power to accept how atrocious the essays are going to be. Resigned, he slings his dull mind through questions that deserve sharp thought. Two-thirds of the way done, he takes to the streets for a run. When he comes back, he realizes he left his brain somewhere along the second mile.

         The final philosophical essay is finished with brawn. After the last semi-coherent sentence had been typed and the essay sent off, he sits motionless in front of his laptop for a couple of hours, all too aware that he’ll be up for the night in zombie mode. At  2 a.m. he indulges. If Kant ever had a pint and a half of raspberries, fudge chips, cookie dough, chocolate, and vanilla ice-cream, he would’ve never worried about transcendental logic; he’d be much too busy worrying about his health. The sugar high cradles him until the dawn hours, where, while listening to “Jumpman” by Drake and Future, he decides to put on thirty pounds of muscle mass.

         Sunday is a slog. At midday he moseys over to the gym, while wondering how he could ever think umbrellas were lame. Saturday’s caffeine carries him through the workout, but the rest of the day consists of waiting for 9 p.m. while walking aimlessly around campus. He manages one more bad decision before bed by going down to the Korean restaurant that serves family friendly dishes, paying ten bucks for a bellyache, and then scurrying back up to his room, where he learns from Terence Mckenna that he doesn’t know how to think for himself. By the second video, he’s drowsy, and his head nearly hits the top of his laptop before he jolts upright.

        Only as he descends into sleep does he find the folding. Here, the world collapses, clean and without crumple.