order

caffeine and existential crises

You had your tenth cup of coffee at 4:13 pm in the afternoon. 

You had never thought there was anything special happening in the five hours past noon. For you, they had always faded past in blurs, clips of faded memory that you could never seem to grasp. The again, you couldn't seem to grasp anything these days. Too much coffee, you assumed. But you wouldn't have it any other way. It was routine nowadays.

Life was simple, as long as you kept it that way.

There was an order for everything. You would go to class at 8:30, every morning, then take a lunch break, which was a study period where you crammed yourself full of information you knew you would never use. Then, you finished you courses at 4:00 and drank coffee until the barista gave you a funny look, or until you felt giddy at the very least. That was how you knew you could stay up until 2:00 am studying. Someone younger may have called your daily grind brutal. You may have laughed in their face.

There were times that were harder than the rest. Exams had you taking quite a few days without sleep, and rewinding a few years back, the SATs had you taking aspirin nearly every day. But hard work had paid off, hadn't it? You had met all your expectations already, met all your standards. Why were you still not satisfied? 

You shook you head furiously, gaining suspicious glances from a few of the train riders next to you. You tried to avoid questions like that, questions that made you think harder, question reality, life the way you knew it.  You had told yourself years ago that if you reached these goals, you would be happy. But you still weren't. 

Maybe it was the stress, or the ten cups of coffee a day, or the train ride where everyone gave you odd looks, or the lingering feeling that something's not right, something got to change. But you should be happy, right? Order said so, and order was everything you'd ever worked for. 

So why couldn't you be happy?