One day your fear will be realized. When the phone rings, your body trembling with a cardiac dub-dub as you press green and hear that a Loved One has died, your fear will be realized. You will squeeze the talking brick, activate needless features like camera, volume control, and God forbid google-voice wondering if buttons placed on the sides of phones were precisely intended for times like this, Man juxtaposing Life’s absurdities with Technology’s. You will, with a mood and maturity that surprises you, understand that the speaker is as much on the verge of self-destruction as you are. That speaking of death is as unbearable as hearing about it. That this is the precise connotation of the word Death will dawn on you like it never has before. And in this exchange of electromagnetically ricocheted utterances, these everything-that-has-to-be-said-has-been-saids, you swell with thoughts of profundity. Because you are so far away, geographically and thus emotionally (yes, to you who especially appreciates that one’s surrounding stirs one’s being (which is why you moved out here in the first place), you will concede that being absent from your L.O.’s surrounding doesn’t facilitate a whole lot of mutual stirring, and that this implies emotional distance, and whether you know it or not, the word “emotion” comes from the Latin motum which surprise surprise means to stir.), you can’t help but assemble abstraction upon abstraction, not unlike a theorem far from its axioms, about the meaning of this Death, the Life swerving implications of this Death, the what-does-it-mean-to-be-alive didactics of this Death. Of course, it is natural to feel these things, but except that to you these are less like feelings and more like contemplations, the realization of which makes you drop your phone. Because you want to feel. Your desire for feeling is not unlike that of a madman’s in the desert, whose thirst is itself a mirage to him. You pick up your phone, hastily apologize into it, which looks like an apology to it because upon saying “I’m coming.”, you hurl your phone at the nearest wall, like this country’s best baseball pitcher, and you watch your phone break into glorious assembly-line-reminiscent pieces. You delight in this new entropy. You scroll through possible plane tickets but only after spending a minute of silence worrying about how to inform your stirrers (and stirrees?) in proximity here; how will they emotionally nurture you when they don’t know the circumstances leading to your sudden departure, let alone know how emotionally starved you are. And so you pick a flight, for a paycheck burning $1800 USD because you are keenly aware that any layover time will all but make you fall off the cliffs of your sanity. And when you read the words “Congratulations! Your Credit Card has been approved”, you feel a resurgence of appetite for entropy. But your laptop is your last convenient means of communication so you bring your knees to your chest and hug yourself in a pathetic attempt to squeeze shut your entropic appetite. You stuff a t-shirt and a pair of boxers into a backpack and are appalled by hygiene’s say in anything. Your phone is silicon cereal so calling a cab will have to be done unconventionally through your laptop, but this time you’re better prepared to receive a Congratulations. Except you aren’t because you’ve just started worrying about your inability to be moved to tears at a time like this. And you’re actually not even really worried about this lack of natural movement to tears but about how you know precisely how to produce tears not just now but whenever you feel like. You simply close your eyes, and conjure images of the L.O. in his/her most extraordinary plainness. You see him/her laugh, and dwell on the innocence of it. You see him/her look at the world around, whether in awe at the spectral sunset over hills, or in dread at the gathering grey of clouds, or in indifference at a bug he/she just squished. And most tear-triggeringly of all, you see him/her do whatever it is he/she is devoted to, and dwell on how lost he/she is in it. And this being lost to you is the most relatable and moving thing; here by lost you mean “removed from all else”. You know that this precisely is what comes closest to making you feel sad, if you’re capable of feeling anything at all. Because your inaccessibility into the living space, the being space, of an individual occupied with what clearly appears to you as being his/her raison, his/her ritualistic exercise to keep boredom at bay (which who said ritual means unthinking? It is really the end point of thinking, it is revelation.), equals your own loneliness. That if loneliness means anything, it is this, that everyone feels it in relation to everybody else. And now your mentation includes the real un-metaphysical i.e. totally no-fucking-around physical loss of this L.O., this Lonely Other, making for a doubly dense pang of sadness, which finally induces you to cry, which self-inducements you never once doubted because they’ve never failed even during your happiest moments (tears of “joy” indeed). Eyeagra falls. And so you’re crying and you mouse over your address on a javascript rendered map, type in the convenient abbreviation LAX, wait for a javascript rendered pinwheel or hourglass designed to sustain an illusion of continuum to complete its animation, view a blurry Congratulations because your eyes are just too damn sad-sogged and the internet, although not neutral, is vastly indifferent. You sling your bag on, tie your shoes, turn all that you can off, regret that you should have really done the dishes yesterday when you had the time but were instead binge watching in one of many of today’s culturally acceptable ways of pissing away one’s life, lock the door, step into an unbearably indifferent outside, get into the car, desperately avoid any talk, even the smallest of small talk if you can and this means holding back your blubbering and looking out the window and away from the driver to avoid making red eye contact with him (slash her, who knows?). You’d ponder about quantum teleportation if you had the relaxing space and circumstance which you so totally are not in possession of now. And now it occurs to you that you will have to sit in two different airplanes, one for fourteen hours and the other for five hours, surrounded by other raison fulfilling beings with whom any kind of speech act ought to be avoided on all possible accounts, and if you do begin to cry and are unlucky not to have an aisle seat and so are stuck and this makes you cry a little more and an air-hostess looks at you and offers you something to drink as though rehydration is the answer (although in fairness what else can she do?), you accept the drink because God knows that’s the only way the Universe gives a shit if it gives one at all; not crying would not elicit any Universal Compassion whatsoever and would leave you morbidly alone. And then you will land not once but twice, making the whole symbolically instructive act of coming down to Earth from your cancerous mentations lose whatever the fuck narrative charm it had. One day, all this will happen and your fear will be realized. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.