A/N:  This is a little something I wrote in a moment of inspiration, and we all know how rare those can be – when they come around, you take advantage of them.  Somewhat autobiographical, though I didn’t write it with myself in mind.  I might decide to expand on it at some point, what do you think?

It’s an ambiguous day today weather-wise.  The sun is shining, but if you look closely you’ll see the storm clouds on the horizon, blue, blending in with the sky on the edges.  It matches my mood.  Yeah, I know, that’s just about the driest cliché ever, but the thing about clichés is that they’re true.  They’re so handy.  But they make me feel like I’m writing a trash novel.  My life as a trash novel.  Interesting concept.  It might work, these days I feel as though my life is a long cliché – the angst, the apathy, the desire for world renunciation.  It’s falling apart at the seams and really, could anything be more cliché?  It’s all been done.  Everything I’m going through has been gone through.  Nothing is new anymore, nothing is exciting.  My apathy frightens me.  Something tells me I shouldn’t not care.  Something tells me I should want to do well and strive towards something.  But I don’t listen to that something – I don’t care enough to.  I watch the noon crowd here in the food court, and where there used to be pity and slight disgust there is now nothing.  Even the desperate desire to never fall prey to this, to never succumb, to do anything to keep myself from being reduced to one of them, is gone.  I simply don’t care anymore.  I used to look around at all the frumpy forty-somethings, the senior citizens (yeah, one last vestige of politeness, even now) clinging to some remnant of youth, the disaffected and just plain dumb teenagers (no politeness left for my generation – really, there never was) and think “Thank God I’m not like that, pray God I never am,” but that has left me.  Everyone still seems as fake and sad and subject to decay as ever, but now it fails to elicit a response from me.  I don’t care. 

It has become my mantra.  I don’t care – about school, about work, about anything.  In fact, if I could have one wish granted, it would be to have a cabin somewhere on a mountain with only a bed in it where I could sleep.  Just sleep, and not be bothered by life, by others, by anything at all.  To fade from everyone’s mind, from my mind.  To just lie there, alone, for as long as I need.  I’m burning-out.  My friends say I’ll be completely burnt-out before twenty if I don’t do something about it.  I know this, they’re right, but I don’t care.  I want to scream it at the top of my voice, I DON’T CARE.  I want people to realize the depth of my apathy, my discontent, my ever-increasing desire to escape.  I don’t want this world anymore.  I don’t want to have anything to do with it.  I don’t care about world peace or human rights anymore – I’m disillusioned.  Hard not to be.  But I have nothing now.  I was living for that, the hope of a better world, but that all went to Hell.  Slowly, gradually, inexorably went to Hell.  What’s left?  I don’t care.  Nothing, it seems.  But why look for purpose in a purposeless world? 

It seems now that I saw this coming; I predicted my own psychological and emotional demise.  And it has been a long time coming.  I fought it at first, struggled to keep believing, to keep hoping, to keep on keeping on, I remember that.  But the real world and my own nature inevitably worked their dark magic on me, and here we are.  And I have a strange feeling that things will get worse before they get better.  Isn’t that always the case?  Everything will come to a head any day now, and God only knows what will come of that.  Anything but this would be good, please.