13

Thirteen is an unedited poem I wrote on my way home last year from my first sketch show with a group of writer friends. I was drunk and still reeling from an already-hard year: terrible heartbreak, and then rape by someone in my comedy community plagued my 2015, and my writings certainly reflect that.

9/24/15
I looked at the bug carcasses laying in the plastic coffin that was the covering of the harsh fluorescents of the N train. Their bodies were like small flecks of possibility that never knew actualization, life that never fully happened because its sole purpose was to provide a moment of clarity for me: I am the bugs. I am the bug carcass for someone else. An instrument of self actualization that, despite my indefinite purpose here and my uncertainty in my own being, I serve a purpose for someone else, either to illuminate the speck of possibility within another's life or to become an intimate part of another human being. Each day, my purpose becomes less clear. Am I a part of this world for my own purpose, to realize a dream placed in me from the moment I could process conscious thought? Or has my entire purpose been to work as an instrument for someone else, or something else that I can't quite or haven't yet realized? What is a carcass but bones and tissues and atoms? Pieces that no longer live in and for themselves and their host, but rot away in the general populous of this world? Perhaps my life isn't even a purposeful existence, but rather a by-product of a cosmically accidental birth. Was I made for a purpose, or did I just happen to happen and am consequently trying to find meaning in an inherently meaningless existence? I can't know, but I suppose it doesn't really matter. It's all just bugs.

#NaPoWriMo2016