The Infinite Starr

The mind will tell you things that are not true then make you responsible for the outcome.

It is a terribly convincing liar.

It knows your voice.

That is its greatest advantage.

It does not arrive like some villain dressed in black, dragging chains through the corridors of your thoughts. It does not announce itself with thunder or knock three times upon the bedroom door.

It simply sounds like you.

You are tired.

You hate this.

You should leave.

You should stay.

Something is wrong.

Nothing is wrong.

And somehow, before breakfast, you have been accused, convicted, sentenced, pardoned, and accused again.

There are days when the only reasonable response is to refuse to participate.

Today was one of those days.

I did not want to leave the house.

I did not want to answer the phone.

I did not want to hear another complaint disguised as an emergency from someone who had apparently been personally betrayed by the ordinary inconvenience of being alive.

My bandwidth had been exceeded sometime around Wednesday.

By Friday, the little wheel in my brain was spinning.

Please wait.

Loading.

Loading.

Still loading.

Absolutely not.

I had spent the entire week surrounded by people, which is usually enough to make a person reconsider every inspirational quote ever written about human connection.

People needed things.

People wanted things.

People had questions.

People had complaints.

People had complaints about the answers to their previous complaints.

Somewhere, surely, there must be a little machine dispensing numbers.

Take one.

Sit down.

Your dissatisfaction is important to us.

We will be with you sometime between now and the collapse of civilization.

I wanted silence.

Not sad silence.

Not lonely silence.

The luxurious kind.

The kind where nobody knows where you are for twenty-four hours.

Maybe forty-eight if life were feeling generous.

I could have slept an entire day.

Unfortunately, life continues assigning homework even when the student has mentally withdrawn from the course.

Laundry.

Errands.

Responsibilities.

Things requiring passwords.

Things requiring pants.

Things requiring interaction with other members of the species.

Life, after all, is for the living.

Or at the very least, the walking dead who remembered to set an alarm.

Still, something felt different.

Not wrong.

Different.

There is a distinction.

Wrong feels like the floor collapsing.

Different feels like discovering the hallway you have walked down every day for ten years suddenly has another door.

You swear it wasn’t there yesterday.

But there it is.

Black wood.

Silver handle.

Waiting.

That feeling had been following me for weeks.

An itch beneath the skin.

A restlessness no vacation could fix.

The strange sensation that somewhere, something had already changed and simply hadn’t bothered informing me yet.

I knew this feeling.

I had felt it before every major turn my life had ever taken.

There is always a moment before everything changes when absolutely nothing appears to be happening.

That is the dangerous part.

People expect change to arrive dramatically.

Suitcases.

Divorce papers.

Job offers.

Funerals.

Wedding invitations.

Moving trucks.

Airports.

But the biggest changes rarely begin there.

They begin quietly.

They begin when something you once cared desperately about becomes strangely unimportant.

They begin when someone says something that would have ruined your entire week six months ago and now you barely look up.

They begin when the argument arrives and you don’t attend.

When the phone rings and you let it.

When someone misunderstands you and you feel no sudden desire to prepare a twelve-page presentation explaining yourself.

When the thing you once clung to begins slipping through your fingers and instead of grabbing tighter…

you open your hand.

That was happening.

I was opening my hand.

One finger at a time.

The strange thing was I hadn’t consciously decided to.

I simply couldn’t remember why I had been holding on so tightly.

Life had become a bit of a drag.

Not tragic.

That would almost have been easier.

Tragedy gives you something to fight.

This was different.

This was standing backstage after the performance had ended while everyone else continued reciting their lines.

The scenery was still there.

The costumes remained.

The actors were still arguing over who forgot which line.

But I could see the ropes holding up the moon.

I could see where the castle wall ended.

I could see the painted windows.

And once you notice the moon is hanging from a rope, it becomes difficult to keep pretending it controls the tide.

I looked around at the things that once required so much of me.

My attention.

My energy.

My anger.

My ambition.

My explanations.

My constant need to fix something.

And suddenly the question wasn’t:

How do I fix this?

It was:

Why am I still here?

That question is dangerous.

Entire lives have been abandoned over smaller ones.

There was nothing left to learn in this particular room.

I had memorized the wallpaper.

Counted the cracks.

Learned which floorboard screamed when stepped upon.

I knew which windows didn’t open.

I knew exactly how the story ended because I had watched the same episode dressed in different clothes a hundred times.

Season after season.

New characters.

Same plot.

Apparently Episode Eight had finally hired a better writer.

Because something was coming.

I could feel it.

Not disaster.

I know disaster.

Disaster kicks down doors.

This was quieter.

Almost romantic.

Like someone standing at the edge of the woods waiting for you to finally notice them.

Every now and then I caught the feeling looking at me.

Not a person.

Not exactly.

A presence perhaps.

A possibility.

Something saying:

You have stayed here long enough.

I didn’t answer.

I had finally learned not everything deserved a response.

That might have been the lesson all along.

My bones were tired.

Maybe they were supposed to be.

Maybe exhaustion isn’t always evidence that you are doing too much.

Sometimes it is evidence that you have stayed too long.

There are places the body begins rejecting before the mind is willing to admit it has outgrown them.

Jobs.

Relationships.

Friendships.

Versions of ourselves.

Entire lives.

The body knows when the costume no longer fits.

It pulls at the collar.

It scratches beneath the fabric.

It whispers:

Take this off.

But the mind panics.

What will we wear instead?

Nothing yet.

That is the frightening answer.

Nothing yet.

Maybe that is why people stay inside old lives.

They would rather wear something that no longer fits than stand naked between identities.

So they keep performing.

Keep explaining.

Keep answering.

Keep complaining.

Keep fixing.

Keep returning.

Until one ordinary morning they wake up and realize they are exhausted from maintaining something that has already ended.

I wondered if that was what had happened to me.

Maybe I wasn’t tired of people.

Maybe I was tired of repetition.

Maybe I didn’t need sleep.

Maybe I needed distance.

Maybe I wasn’t losing motivation.

Maybe motivation had simply packed its bags because it knew before I did that we weren’t staying.

There is something strangely beautiful about the moment you stop chasing answers.

The world becomes quieter.

Not because people stop talking.

They absolutely do not.

People would continue complaining during the apocalypse if the meteor blocked their preferred parking space.

The quiet happens inside you.

You stop volunteering your nervous system as a community bulletin board.

You stop carrying conversations home.

You stop defending yourself to people committed to misunderstanding you.

You stop speaking into deaf ears.

Ignore.

Delete.

Block.

Continue.

There is a certain elegance to becoming unavailable to nonsense.

Maybe that sounds cold.

It isn’t.

Winter isn’t cruel because the flowers disappear.

The earth simply knows everything cannot bloom continuously.

Some things must go underground.

Some things must die.

Some things must rest long enough to become something else.

So perhaps that was what I was doing.

Going underground.

Resting.

Letting the old roots rot.

Because somewhere beneath everything I could feel something moving.

The loop had developed a crack.

The needle had skipped.

The train I had ridden faithfully around the same track year after year had begun slowing near a junction I had never noticed before.

And there it was.

The crossroads.

I had been there before.

Of course I had.

We all have.

But crossroads are strange places.

They never look the same twice.

Sometimes they look like opportunities.

Sometimes endings.

Sometimes heartbreak.

Sometimes boredom.

Sometimes they disguise themselves as exhaustion so you will finally sit still long enough to notice where you are.

Four roads stretched outward into darkness.

None had signs.

Naturally.

Life could provide a little signage considering everything else it expects from us, but apparently mystery is part of the experience.

I stood there listening.

Nothing.

For once, absolutely nothing.

No advice.

No complaints.

No instructions.

No voice telling me what I should do next.

Just wind moving through dead trees.

The moon above them.

And somewhere far away, something that sounded almost like laughter.

I waited.

Then I heard it.

Not from the road ahead.

Not from behind me.

Not from the woods.

From beneath my feet.

A whisper rising through the dirt.

Soft.

Familiar.

Almost affectionate.

There you are.

I looked down.

The crossroads had remembered me.

That was when I understood why nothing had felt right lately.

Why the old things had lost their shine.

Why conversations felt heavier.

Why the life I had worked so hard to build suddenly looked like scenery after the audience had gone home.

I had assumed I was becoming ungrateful.

Restless.

Bored.

Burned out.

Maybe even lost.

But lost people search desperately for directions.

I wasn’t searching anymore.

I had stopped asking.

Stopped begging.

Stopped explaining.

Stopped trying to make dead things answer me.

I was simply standing still.

And perhaps that was precisely what the crossroads had been waiting for.

Because some roads do not appear while you are running.

They wait until you stop.

The wind moved again.

One of the paths disappeared into darkness.

Another seemed to circle backward toward everything familiar.

The third looked safe enough.

The fourth couldn’t be seen at all.

Naturally, that was the one whispering.

I smiled.

Not because I knew where it went.

Because for the first time, I didn’t need to.

Something inside me had already stepped onto it.

The rest of me was merely catching up.

So I remained there a little longer.

Still.

Silent.

Listening.

The old life calling faintly behind me.

The unknown breathing somewhere ahead.

And the crossroads beneath my feet whispering the strangest instruction I had ever heard.

Do not move yet.

So I didn’t.

Because sometimes the moment life tells you to move is the exact moment you should become perfectly still.

Not because you are afraid.

Not because you are uncertain.

But because a new direction speaks much softer than an old life screams.

And I had finally stopped listening to screaming.

Behind me, somewhere in the darkness, a door closed.

I never turned around to see who had shut it.

Maybe nobody had.

Maybe it had been closed for years.

I had simply been standing in front of it, knocking.

The crossroads whispered again.

This time I could almost make out the direction.

Almost.

I closed my eyes.

And for the first time in a very long time, I wasn’t asking life where I was going.

I was waiting for it to remember where it had been taking me all along.